The Painter: A Novel (33 page)

Her back was to us, she was at the sideboard pouring out a decanter of single malt scotch into a tumbler of ice. She was wearing a halter top and her skin was soft copper. She had a beautiful back, strong and slender, and seeing it, unprotected, under the black curls that spilled to the faint wings of her shoulder blades, seeing it I almost forgave her everything. The rages, the drinking, the absences. I loved her more right then than I had ever loved anything but Alce. I thought: She is regal. And she was, in a way. She was a Marquez from Mora County and her family had been in those valleys since something like the fifteen hundreds. When she turned I knew by the shine in her eyes she was already on her second scotch.

“Damn, this is good,” she said. “Best I ever had. You want one? You guys?”

She shook the ice to chime against the glass and toured the room, holding the drink with the nonchalance of a Gatsby flapper. Stopped at an end table, picked up a photo of what must have been the patron and her family on top of a wooded mountain with lakes or inlets behind it, maybe Maine. They were fit and tan and had very white teeth. “The people you’re mixing with now. Swank,” she said, turning the frame toward me. “Look, the daughter’s t-shirt says
YALE
. My my.” She set it down and went to an art deco framed print on the wall: Dartmouth Winter Carnival 1981,
a ski jumper sailing off a hill, a church spire in the valley below him. Cristine tapped the glass with a tapered fingernail, right at the jumper’s head. Her silver bracelets jingled. “Careful, young man,” she said. “You think you are an eagle now, unh huh. There are things out here none of this snow can prepare you for.”

I said, “I was thinking maybe we could take Alce to the zoo.”

“The zoo?” Her eyes blurred. She had to shake her mind free of the Ivy League winter.

“We have four hours until the opening, and it’s pretty close to here. They have polar bears. Polar bears that play in the water. Where you can see through the glass.”

She twisted her lips into a smile. “Alce will go crazy.” She knocked back the rest of the tumbler. “White people, white snow, white bears.”

We got back in the truck and drove to the zoo. I opened all the windows against the reek of booze. I bought the tickets while Cristine fished a beer out of the cooler in the truck. She couldn’t take the can through the turnstile, so she downed the whole thing in a frat boy chug. Even then she was glorious: her smooth forearm flexed, her strong shoulder swelled with layers of smooth muscle, the wide silver bracelet glinted at her wrist. No big deal, I told myself, she’s on vacation.

For an hour we were a perfect family. It was mid-afternoon on a mid-May school day and not crowded, and we walked four abreast, hand in hand on the wide paths. We gawked at the peacocks wandering freely, at the elephants bathing in dust, at the leopards stretched along the limbs of a huge tree in such a trance of stillness they seemed emitted by the dappled shade. I thought, Relax.

It will never get better than this. You are about to open a big show, everyone you care about is okay. You have a family.

Alce was floored by everything. In total thrall. She tugged us along like the streamer to a little kite. The hyenas transfixed her. The Komodo dragon wanted to eat her through the glass and she wanted to be eaten. She ran ahead, a double size pink cotton candy flagging her like a showy flower. She got it sticky all over her face and took it into the bird house and some kind of tropical finch landed on her shoulder and surprised them both. Maybe it wanted the candy. The bird twitched and they both let out a squeak and the finch flew off and Alce burst into hysterical laughter. Cristine picked up her daughter and squeezed and said, “You are like St. Francis, you know that? The birds can’t help themselves. Me neither!”

We strolled up to the polar bears. We could hear sea lions barking nearby. I wondered if the smell of prey so close drove the polar bears crazy. Probably not, they were probably prodigiously fed.

“Let’s check out the underwater window first,” I said. “Yeah, yeah!” chimed Alce. The bears were playing. Luck. Two huge white adults and one little one swam through the green water in a parody of walking, then dove with the sudden graceful fluidity of a loon. From ten feet away we gasped. Ten feet from the big plate glass. The bears were playing keep-away with a rubber fish the size of a twenty pound salmon. Alce ran forward. She forgot all about her cotton candy and dropped it on the way. A family was already there, pressed against the glass, three towheaded kids Alce’s age and older, and a mom with streaked blond hair and gold scallop earrings and a lily patterned summer dress. Alce pushed through the two boys, completely focused on the bears. “Hey, hey,” called Irmina, laughing,
“Cálmate Alcita
, be polite.”
“Mummy!”
cried the littlest, “the
Mexican
girl pushed me!” The mother was just turning
from the glass. Alce said, “Am not! I’m not Mexican!” “You are, too!” insisted the boy. “I heard you speaking Mexican!”

“Was not!” shouted Alce, her face wavering between crumpling and setting for a fight.

“You’re a
spic
like Sergito!” the boy taunted, shoving Alce back, his eyes flashing toward his mother, not quite sure of his ground, knowing it was a bad word.

That was all it took. Cristine stepped fast between them and crouched so that she was level with the boy and put her hand on the boy’s chest. “
What
did you call my daughter?” she said, very cool. “Do we shove other children?” I knew, coming from her, what the gesture meant, her hand across the boy’s rib cage. It meant: let’s stop right now, let’s reassess. Let’s gather ourselves and feel fully who we really are. Forceful and gentle at the same time. Whatever else she was, she had a special way with children.

The lilied mother didn’t: know what Cristine meant, nor care. The kid was in too much shock to speak. The mom lunged for her son and swatted away Cristine’s arm like a forceful volley at the net. “How
dare
you!” she blurted. She had no idea. No idea what she’d just asked for. Cristine stood slowly and wound up away from her and pivoted from the torso and slapped the woman full force, open handed across the face. It almost knocked her over. Even the bears heard it, probably. They swam down to the glass curious. All three kids wailed. An overweight guard in a silly khaki safari outfit hurried up. Alce stood there in the midst of the ruckus, her face sticky with pink, and watched it all unfold above her, uncrying, her jaw set like a boxer.

I finally broke my own trance and stepped between the women, the two camps, and separated them like a bouncer in a bar fight.
The guard in khaki repeated over and over, “That’s enough! That’s enough! Plenty of bear for everyone!” I knew how she felt. Cristine and the other mom stared at each other, both breathing hard, neither crying, both stung beyond tolerance, both gathering their children to themselves. Pretty evenly matched in tiger mom fury and courage, I have to say. The Waspy woman’s cheek was scarlet but the skin was unbroken. Probably lucky for all of us. She was smart, too, I could tell. She was calculating very fast the percentages—of gain and loss in pressing charges, in dragging her children through more of this kind of day, and suddenly she knelt down, looked her three kids full in the face, each one, tallying the damage, it was livable, and stood, and very haughty, uttered, “Let’s go! Alex, Jessie, Connor.
Now!
” and they were gone. Leaving us with the liturgical guard, intoning, “That’s
enough
. Plenty, plenty of polar bear for everyone!”

Amazing, given Cristine’s pugnaciousness and my volatility that we stayed together for ten more years. After Alce died the marriage broke like an egg. Cristine moved to Tempe and I hear she married the heir to an oil fortune, an alternative therapist who uses flashing lights and spirit journeys to heal his patients. I hear she is content.

“How could I forget?” I said now.

Irmina broke into a wide smile. “I remember how Alce never cried, and how all the way home she kept looking up at her mom with like a new appreciation, like, Holy cow, Mom knocked the shit out of the mother of those mean kids. Wow. After the other family left she didn’t know whether to look at the bears or at Cristine.” Irmina laughed. “After that I think she kind of saw Cristine as the sheriff.”

“That’s what she told me. Why did you bring it up?”

“She learned to fight from her mom.”

“Well.”

The parking lot, the bag of pot, Alce kicking the gangbanger. Well. I knew she learned to fight from both of us. I could feel the tears running on my cheeks.

Alce always adored Irmina. Made Cristine jealous sometimes. I suddenly understood that Alce’s death was like losing a daughter for Irmina, too. That she had been grieving alongside me every step of the way. I’d been so leveled by my own blind loss. Fuck, Jim, self-centered doesn’t even begin to describe it.

I reached across the table and took her hand. It was small and warm.

“I’ve been an ass.”

She raised an eyebrow. “More like a crazed bear I think.”

“You miss her as much as I do.”

Whatever she was feeling, it moved like a flock of fast small birds, the way they whir into and out of a bush.

She squeezed. “I know,” she said. “I know how much you love me.”

“You do?”

Her smile lit the table.

“You want some ribs?”

“Venison? Sure.”

There were no other kind with Irmina. She shot a deer whenever she needed one, in season or out. She was always careful never to shoot a doe with fawn. Her neighbors knew, I guess. Out here the state game wardens were tracked like weather events, like tornadoes. Phones rang down the county roads, anything not quite legal went into the sheds, the lofts. Clap went the barn doors.
Hello, Warden! Nice day! How’s the wife, the kids?
A way of life.

She got the pan off the woodstove, I went outside into her little sculpture garden. The clouds had moved in and darkened the sky and the sun was a smudge in an ominous overcast. Sometimes a stormy morning can feel like dusk and unsettle the hills. Nothing cast a shadow. In among the sage and the wild rose were some of my fish and birds. They were jumping and swooping. Steel and wood. I could smell the plants. The air was still, a perfect outbreath of day, caesura, pause. Like evening. I could hear the buzz and thrum of hummingbirds going to the feeders but didn’t see them. Was this it? All I had needed the past few months? The perfect stillness? The needing nothing for just a minute? Or did I just need to be seen? Seen right through without fear. I walked over to the edge of her piñons and a jackrabbit shot from under a saltbush and zagged off into the false twilight. Most of us are never seen, not clearly, and when we are we likely jump and run. Because being seen can be followed by the crack of a shot or the twang of an arrow. I took a leak in the flinty dirt. I didn’t know what any of us wanted.

We ate venison ribs in a green chili sauce and late kale from her garden. I wanted badly to tell her everything, from the first fight with Dell. I wanted to see her eyes when I told her I had killed two brothers. That they were orphans, that they were cruel, bad men,
but that they had fought for each other their whole lives until I came along. Irmina, more than anyone I had ever met, seemed to be able to feel the balance of energies in the universe. If there were a god who cared about the death of a single sparrow, I knew a woman who could feel it. I wanted to see what the men’s deaths meant to her, to the hot and cold currents, the colors that swirled around her. Maybe I wanted to be absolved. But I also knew better. The way Sport was leaning on Sofia, I knew it was better to keep the stories to myself. You tell a story and no matter how well it is sequestered it still lives. It may be in hibernation, like those microbes trapped in the Antarctic ice. So I told her about the paintings instead. I described them one after another in order, making up the titles I couldn’t remember.
Ocean of Women, The Grave in the Garden, Two Horses Carrying a Girl
. She watched me closely, and at some point in the telling she closed her eyes and I knew she could see each one, the images in her mind more faithful in their way than the paintings themselves. I told her about giving the picture of the beaver ponds to the trucker, and about the painting of the toiling men in the valley I had titled
In Hostile Country. Horse and Crow. The Two Boats
. I told her about the birds following the more distant longboat. I understood as I told it that she was already way ahead of me, that her understanding outstripped the details, that she let me tell it because I needed to. When I finished I said,

“I don’t know why I put both of them on the same sea.”

“They are on the same sea. We all are.”

“What about the birds? Following her?”

“The fish are probably giving her an escort. The birds are eating the fish.”

“Huh. Never thought of that. Maybe I should take it back and put in the fish.”

“Leave it alone. You have your gun?” she asked.

Startled: “In the truck,” I said.

“Is it—?”

I nodded.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You’re not a bear, I take it back. You’re a big dumb ox.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, okay, go. Go back to town. Someone will be waiting for you. Before you leave my property get rid of it. Promise me.”

“Okay.”

“You’re sleepy, huh?”

“Yah. All of a sudden.”

She smiled. “Go take a nap in the hammock. Your favorite spot. Then go.”

I hugged her. I may have been a dumb ox but I hugged her like a bear.

I did. I lay in the hammock under her ramada and fell asleep to the buzz and whir of the hummingbirds. I didn’t dream. When I woke it was late afternoon and the sky was still heavy with clouds. I felt refreshed and went straight to the truck. I didn’t say goodbye again, didn’t have to.

Near the end of her driveway, in a stirring of breeze that smelled like rain, I walked off a few hundred yards into the mesquite with my little folding shovel and I buried the gun. I buried it deep and covered it carefully. On private property. Then I walked big circles all through the brush. I drove back through Tesuque and stopped at the Village Market for a beer. It was happy hour and packed with rich hipsters, young and old in silver concha belts, and a lot of local manitos too. Everyone seemed to be getting along. That was like the old days. A band was setting up. Must be Thursday or Friday. I ordered a Buckler, a non-alcoholic beer, and enjoyed sitting at the bar without a single agenda. Nothing to do but sit and look, listen, drink. There was the line from one of the poetry books I kept thinking about, from T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
. I felt in the zippered breast pocket of my coat and pulled out the wrinkled slip of paper.