Via Dolorosa (8 page)

“Well,” Nick said, “maybe you’ll find something inside the hotel to photograph.”

Isabella smiled again. She was very pretty. “There are always interesting things to photograph,” she told him. “There is never a shortage of such interesting things.”

“Well, I hear the storm should pass soon enough,” Nick said.

“That is good,” Isabella said.
“
Muy
bueno
.”

“Isabella lives in Greenwich Village,” Emma said suddenly, turning and looking at her husband. “Isn’t it a small world? I was telling her how we’d looked for a place in the city before you left for Iraq, but that we couldn’t afford anything.” To Isabella, she said, “Anyway, they shipped him off sooner than we’d hoped. Not that, you know, not that we hoped he would be shipped off. But I guess some things, they’re inevitable. Anyway, it was all very sudden. He wanted a place in the city, a little studio in the city where he could paint, but, well, it was all very sudden.”

“We didn’t look very hard, really,” Nick stated. “We could have probably found a place.”

“But we went on a great trip before Nick was shipped overseas. We spent a week in the city, stayed at the Edison in Times Square, and it was spectacular. I’d never been to New York and Nick had been only once, when he was very young, so it was like we were learning about the city together. It was much bigger than I’d expected, too, but I was confident I could live there, even when Nick was away. I’d promised him that I’d get into a routine and work him into it once he came back.”

“It just didn’t work out,” he said. “We didn’t have enough time before I had to leave.”

“It was very sudden,” Emma said again. It was a point she seemed
intent on making.

“But you’re not from New York originally,” Nick said.

“No, no,” said Isabella. “Madrid, Spain. I came here as a child,
though, and traveled with my father. My mother, she died when I was
very young, and my father and I did much traveling together.”

“Do you go back often?” he said. “To Spain?”

“I have been back only once.”

“To see your father?”

“Sadly, no. He is dead now.”

“Oh,” he said, and could not think of anything else to say.

“So you find New York City to be a good place to paint?” Isabella
asked, and she was watching Nick now like someone suddenly curious,
fondling him with her eyes. “Personally, I find it very inspirational.”

“I suppose,” he said. In truth, he had not been inspired by anything
in the city after returning from overseas and, really, he no longer
entertained any desire to live in the city, or to move anywhere outside
the small Pennsylvania town where he and Emma occupied the narrow,
drafty, two-bedroom townhouse left to him by his father. He found,
rather quickly and with some vexation, that he felt incapable of any
amount of inspiration, regardless of location, since his return from Iraq.

“I find Boston to be that way, too,” Isabella said. “I love shooting
in Boston.”

“Oh, we’ve been meaning to go to Boston, too,” Emma said, now
quite visibly excited that she had, at least in the bowels of her own privileged
superstitions, unwittingly found herself in the center of some inexplicable
choreography of fate. “I have relatives there and Nick and I
were planning to go visit some day. We wanted to go in the winter when
it wouldn’t be so crowded in the city.”

“It is cold,” Isabella said.

“But not so crowded,” said Emma.

“So, Nicholas, you were in Iraq,” Isabella said.

“Yes.”

“How long were you there?”

“Just under a year. Eleven months.”

“Did you see any real fighting?”

Something in him found the question insulting. “Some,” he said.
And it occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t the question he’d found
insulting but, rather, the way Isabella Rosales had intended it. There was
something about her nature that provoked him, although he could not
tell for certain if it was deliberate or not.

“I would love to shoot out in Iraq.” Then, smiling, Isabella Rosales
added, “Photos, I mean. Not guns.”

“Don’t worry. There are enough guns out there already,” Nick assured
her.

“I would take pictures of the children,” she said. “I would take pictures
of their bodies being piled into the back of pickup trucks. I would
take pictures of their raw skin and the blood and how their heads turn
funny on their necks when they are lifted from the streets.”

Nick did not say anything. Emma, too, was silent; she could only
stare at Isabella and could not find a single word to say.

“Well,” Nick said, feeling his eyebrows rise.

“Do you have any pictures from when you were there? I would love
to see them if you have them.”

“No,” he said. “No pictures. No one I was with took any pictures.”

“That is too bad,” Isabella said. “People here, on this side of the
world, they do not really know what it is like to be over there. People
here don’t know what it’s like to be where you were, and to see the things
you saw. They don’t know what it is like to be you.”

“I guess not,” Nick said, and thought,
Who the hell knows anything
about anything? Do you think a few photographs would make all the difference?
Do you think a few black and white glossies could do it all any justice?
No one knows. I was there and sometimes I think I don’t know, either. And
maybe we’re not supposed to know. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
And as for pictures, taking pictures, maybe it truly is too bad that no one I
was with took any pictures, but we were all too busy carrying our gear and
our rifles and an extra pair of socks while we hunkered, in an attempt to stay
cool, in the shade of a nearby Abrams MBT, its guns still hot and smoking
and grease-smelling, and all of us with our prized personal possessions tucked
away in the creased and hidden pockets of our fatigues. We worry about ambushes
and we worry about turning the wrong corner and we worry about
the hot desert dust jamming our M-4s and M-16s and not being able to use
them properly or at all, but we do not worry about photographs, taking photographs.
What’s a photograph?

“Will they be sending you back?” Isabella asked him.

“No.”

“That’s good, staying in the U.S.”

“Nick was injured,” Emma spoke up. “Show her your hand, Nick.”

“She doesn’t want to see that,” he said, amiable as possible. He lifted
his espresso and hid behind it as best he could.

“It’s okay, Nick,” Emma continued.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, Emma.”

Thankfully, Isabella was perceptive to his discomfort. She waved
one hand, so casually and in control, and said, as if nothing in the world
could possibly matter to her at that moment, “It’s all right. I was just curious
to know if you would be going back, Nicholas. I was going to wish
you luck if you were.”

“He’s not,” Emma said. “Once we leave here, we’ll be in Pennsylvania
for good.”

Isabella Rosales smiled. “That is terrific for you.”

Nick finished his espresso and stood. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I
need to get some work done. It was nice meeting you, Isabella.”

“Oh, yes, Nicholas. And I’m sure we will see each other again.”

“All right,” he said, and turned to Emma, his wife. “I can meet you
for a late lunch, if you want.”

“That would be nice.”

“I’ll come by the room.”

“I can order in,” Emma said. “Do you know what you’ll want?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Make it a surprise.”

—Chapter IV—

He enlisted the services of a young, sturdy-looking bellhop to assist him in carrying his supplies trunk down into the lobby. It was heavy and the bellhop disappeared once before they even bothered to lift the trunk, and returned with a dolly. They hoisted the trunk onto the dolly together, Nick favoring his good hand, only to discover one of the casters was inoperable and refused to roll with such a weight pressing down on it, and so the bellhop disappeared a second time and returned with a new dolly with fully functioning casters.

“You have lead weights in here or something?” the bellhop said as they maneuvered the dolly onto the elevator.

“Painting supplies.”

“Hey, you’re not the guy they hired to paint that wall down in the lobby, are you?”

“In the tired flesh.”

“Really? Excellent. You know, I was looking at the drawing—the outline—the—what do you call it?—last night after I got off work. Some friends came by to pick me up and we were all just staring at it. You’re pretty damn good.”

“Thanks.”

“So you do this a lot?”

“What? Paint?”

“Paint murals in hotels and whatever.”

“No,” Nick said. “This is my first one.”

“No kidding? How much they pay you for something like that?”

“They pay enough,” Nick said.

“Yeah? Pretty good, man. Must be nice,” the bellhop said, “to have a talent like that, where you can squat at a hotel and paint all day and whatever. And get paid. Good deal. Know what I mean?”