After she had encountered him on the street, Jim had sat in the driver’s seat of his car with her beside him, his hands gripping the wheel, his face a mask of concentration as he tried to think of something that would provide evidence of his wife’s and daughter’s existence. The poem had been one idea, and then as she’d opened the car to leave, he’d reached out, hooked a finger into her belt, and pulled her back inside. Then he’d leaned across the seats, so close to her that for a second Trix had been a little scared. Jim had never unsettled her before, but his breath had smelled of fear, his eyes were wide as a rabbit’s in headlights, and she’d wondered, Am I really on my own after all?
“There’s a painting,” he’d said. “It’s… special. Jenny knew about it, but no one else, not even Jonathan. Not even you.”
“Special how?” she’d asked, and instantly felt at ease once again. She was as eager to cling on to Jim as he was to her, because right now he was all she seemed to know. In Tallulah’s, the waitress had recognized her right away. No shock at the pink hair, no confusion over this subtly changed woman. I’ve always been like this here, Trix had thought, and the idea distressed her more and more.
“I painted it before I met Jenny,” he’d said. One hand rested on Trix’s knee, and the warmth was comfort to both of them. “I don’t usually do portraits, and this one… well, even this isn’t quite that. But it’s me and a woman, bodies enveloped with storm clouds, sunlight, reveling in the natural. And the woman is Jenny.”
“What do you mean?”
“I painted it before we even met.” He’d waved his hand. “Oh, there are differences. It’s like Jenny how she might have been, not exactly how she is. But it was as if I’d created a vision of my perfect woman, and then two years later…” He’d sobbed then, and Trix closed her hand over his and squeezed.
“Just tell me where it is.”
So now she climbed the narrower staircase to his studio, desperately hoping that the painting of Jim’s wife- her friend, the woman she’d loved for a long time-was still up there.
When she clicked the studio lights on she knew to squeeze her eyes shut. Jim had special lighting there, designed to be as close to real daylight as possible. She waited a few moments, then opened her eyes slowly, letting them adjust as she looked around the room. The fact that the studio appeared completely different was not what surprised and shocked her; she’d anticipated that, and the canvases propped around the place lived up to her expectation. Most of them seemed to be part of one advertising campaign or another, but their style was markedly different from what she was used to seeing from Jim. Before, his paintings had always had a soul about them, some element of tone or mood that she always found moving, whether they were seascapes painted for his own pleasure or advertising images for a new brand of sneaker. He’d always found some way to affect the viewer, and Trix always attributed that to Jim’s own sensitive personality. These paintings were different: brash, loud, technically brilliant but lacking in something profound. She imagined that they pleased many advertisers with their directness, and probably earned him a lot of money. But the soul had gone.
She crossed to the rear of the studio where the large storage racking system still stood behind two doors. Pulling the racks out and pivoting them aside, she flicked on the soft light inside the cupboard and entered. There was a mess of old canvases at the back, and he’d told her that the painting of him and Jenny lay buried behind them. Not because it was bad, but because it had always unnerved him. Jenny found it beautiful; he just wondered where it had come from.
Trix moved canvases aside, frowning at the different sense of Jim these paintings gave her. That’s the Jim I know down there, she had to keep reminding herself. But in that case, where was the Jim who had painted all these? She shivered, shook her head, and started whistling as she searched. But the whistle made the studio feel even more deserted, so she stopped.
The painting was obvious when she saw it, but she did not recognize the place it represented. A man and woman, yes, but like no one she had ever known, their features emphasized and stylized in a strangely cartoonish manner, his enlarged penis and her rounded breasts more explicit than anything Jim had ever painted. The sex in the picture was brazen and rich, the figures painted with loving attention, but it only made her feel uneasy. She stared at their faces, but there was nothing familiar there. The man seemed to stare over her shoulder; the woman glared right back, eyes wide and harsh.
“You didn’t paint this,” she said, backing away, rolling the racks back in after her, and closing the doors. This was not Jim’s studio, at least not the Jim she knew so well. “What the fuck is this?” she shouted again. There was no reply. She wondered what she would discover back in her own apartment, and the thought of going there and seeing unknown things filled her with dread. This place lacked not only touches of Jenny and Holly but the imprint of Jim himself. And yet it was his place still.
Trix turned to run from the room, then froze.
On the pedestal beneath the wide windows stood one of her nightmares. Since a brush with death at the age of seven, she’d had disturbing dreams of an unknown city. But since her near-fatal car crash three years before, another city had intruded upon her nightmares just as powerfully-different, yet hauntingly familiar. And now here it was. She closed her eyes, fighting the queasiness that swept through her, biting the inside of her lip to prevent herself from fainting. When she looked again, she was hoping it would have changed, that she’d imagined it… but no, it was still there. And it was the only thing in the whole apartment that she truly recognized.
“I never told Jenny,” Jim said. They were sitting in the car together again, Trix panting as she tried to catch her breath. It was fear that had winded her, and uncertainty. “She never liked those paintings, but she thought they were all mine. I never told her that some of them came from you. She was weirded out enough that we both saw these two strange places in our dreams.”
“Nightmares,” Trix said.
“Whatever.” He was staring ahead, and she could tell by the set of his jaw that he was fighting hard.
“It was exact,” she said. “Just… as if you plucked it from my mind.”
“But that one was based on my dream,” he said. “I’ve done others after talking to you, but that one was…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Last night.”
“That can’t be,” Trix said, but those words seemed weak and ineffectual in the light of what had happened. “Maybe you should go and look, see if-”
“No!” he said. “I’ve finished with that place for tonight.” He glanced sidelong at her. “Can we go to your apartment, talk this through? Try and decide what the fuck is going on?”
“My place?” She’d been trying on a blouse in the changing room of her favorite clothes shop, Francine’s, when the faint had washed over her. Something’s gone, she’d thought as she leaned against the mirror, closing her eyes and then snapping them open again when something had twisted through her. That was the best way she could think of describing it-there had been no actual pain, but it felt as if every part of her body flexed and shifted, just for an instant. And as her breath faded from the mirror’s surface, a stranger stared back at her.
Somehow, Trix had managed not to scream. She’d smiled in apology -something’s broken the mirror, and I’m looking into the next changing cubicle at a cute-looking woman with pink spiky hair and a designer torn top that I like but would never have the guts to wear- and then when the woman returned her smile she’d taken a step back -I don’t know her, she looks harmless enough, but there’s no telling just how -and then the realization as her hands traveled up over her unfamiliar body, her eyes went wide, and every move she made was imitated by the woman in the mirror. Thinner, more athletic; just as she glimpsed the unknown tattoo peering from beneath her sleeve, her palm passed across her breast and felt the piercing in her nipple. “No!” she had gasped, leaning forward and misting the mirror again.
The next few moments were a blur. Fleeing the changing rooms, the browsers and shoppers not staring even though something was terribly wrong, somehow remembering to pay for the new clothes she wore, the clothes she’d never have been daring enough to wear before. And then in the street outside, the instant decision-she was much closer to Jenny’s than her own apartment.
She had wandered at first, freaking out, trying to find some proof that she was hallucinating. In a bar near Kenmore Square, she had stopped and had a shot of rum, and then another, but the woman looking back at her from the mirror behind the bar remained the same punky chick she’d first encountered in that dressing room.
At last, not knowing what else to do and needing someone to hold her, to tell her she was still herself, she had gone to Jim and Jenny’s. Finding no one at home, she’d waited in Tallulah’s for them to return.
“I haven’t been back home,” she whispered. “Not since…”
“Trix,” Jim said. He was trying to comfort her, but there was desperation in his voice, too. She reached out and took his hand, and they sat silently for a few moments. He knows I’m me, Trix thought.
