A Grave Talent

single thing, like painting, that allows genius to produce. If you have to worry about folding clothes and constipated babies—if you have to worry about having babies at all—you can't concentrate on one important thing. Geniuses of any kind are always impossibly bloody, single-minded bastards, and women have never had that option, not as a class, not until very recently.'

'What about Eva Vaughn? Or wouldn't you count her as first rate?'

'Oh, God, yes, especially considering that she's only in her thirties and getting better all the time. I don't know about her, why she doesn't fit the mold, except that maybe her genius is just so exceptionally great that it rules her. Nobody knows much about her. Even that article in Time said that she wouldn't meet with the person who wrote it, although they talked on the phone a couple of times. Remember the rumor that Eva Vaughn was actually a man? That one's still around, by the way. I heard a couple talking about it in the gallery.'

'You don't think it's possible, though?'

'There'd be no point in it. The work is so good it makes no difference if it was done by a man or a woman. No, I'm sure she's a woman, a woman who's somehow managed to break away from caution.' Lee tapped the photograph of Strawberry Fields that lay on the table, and looked wistful. 'I'd love to meet her, to know how she's done it, how she was raised to be that free.'

And now Kate knew how it had happened. Eva Vaughn would have been a fine painter any time, any place, but nearly a decade in a tough women's prison, convicted of a crime intolerable even to the other inmates, had flayed her of her caution, had cut her loose from any of the expected possibilities. A normal woman would have gone mad, or retreated into the anonymity of ordinariness, or died. Instead, Vaun Adams, Eva Vaughn, had become empty of herself, had become a pair of all-seeing eyes and a pair of hands that held a brush, and she had channeled the pain and the beauty of life into her canvases. She was a murderer who had strangled a small girl, a child who would now be a woman of twenty-four had she lived. Nothing Vaun could be or do would make up for that, and deep down Kate could never finally forgive her. Painful as it was, she knew that her own work, her own humanity, demanded that she pit herself against the woman who had painted those magnificent visions of the human spirit. It was a bitter thought, as filthy and oppressive as the night outside.

On the outskirts of the city Hawkin woke and reached for the thermos.

'Not letting up any, is it?'

Kate pulled her thoughts back into polite normality with roughly the effort of pulling a boot from deep mud.

'No,' she said. 'No, if anything it's worse. The wind certainly is, even on this side of the hills.'

'Ah, well, it'll blow over soon.' He seemed almost cheery, disgustingly so considering the night and the thoughts that had been in possession of Kate's mind.

'Do you always wake up so cheerful after a nap?'

'Always, if it's a nap. Sleep is a fine thing. You should try it sometime.' Kate hadn't had a nap since she was five years old.

'Not while I'm driving, thanks.'

'You're probably right. What's that line about Brother Sleep?'

'Something from Saint Francis, no doubt.'

'No, it's Shelley. 'How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep.''

'A comforting thought,' she said drily.

'Isn't it? Isn't it just?' He took a swallow of the coffee and made a disgusted noise. 'Goddamn goat's milk again. What's that you're listening to?'

She reached over and switched off the mumble of voices.

'A discussion of how to prepare for a catastrophe.'

'Appropriate. Drop me at the station, would you? Then go home and get some sleep. You've done well today.'

She tried to find the words patronizing, but in the end succumbed to the little glow of warmth they started up in her.

'We aim to please.'

'Wish I thought the same of Trujillo. Christ, what a miserable night.'

The garage was empty, which gave Kate a moment's pause until she remembered that this was a third Thursday, Lee's night working at the med center. Hell. The automatic door rumbled shut behind her, and she gathered up an armload of debris from the car—sodden clothing, sandwich bags, thermos and two cups, handbag, shoulder holster, jacket. Plodding up the stairs she thought, I have been on duty or reading files for fifty hours out of the last seventy-six, since six o'clock Monday night. I am tired.

With that thought came another, something that had occurred to her as she drove home. She glanced down at the boxes of newspapers and magazines piled at the back of the garage awaiting recycling, and then shook her head firmly and went on. Nope. Not even for Al Hawkin. It would wait. She needed to sit still, think of nothing, eat something. One word of praise from the man was not going to turn her into a fanatic.

At the top of the stairs she unlocked the door, stepped into the house, dropped the armload in an untidy heap on the floor, turned, and walked back down the stairs.

The magazine she was looking for wasn't in the recycling bins, so she turned to the doors under the stairs and began a haphazard search: intuition, past experience had taught her, was the best tool to use in breaking Lee's idiosyncratic filing system.

It took another twenty minutes, about average. She shoved the rest of the journals, magazines, and photocopied abstracts back into place, wrestled the doors shut, and returned to the house.

She tossed the magazine onto the kitchen table and went to investigate the refrigerator, whose contents sat complacent in the knowledge that in her present state they were quite safe. She took out the cheese bin and broke off some knobs of a hard orange cheddar, dumped half a box of crackers into a big bowl with the cheese and a couple of pears, poured some dark, heady Pinot Noir into a stubby French glass, and took the lot back to the table, where she sat with her elbows on either side of the magazine, emptying bowl and glass and reading the article.

It was even longer than she remembered, a fair chunk of the glossy art journal's hundred and fifty pages, and actually comprised separate articles by three different people, two men and a woman. She looked at the three photographs, two of them older and aristocratic faces, one aggressively blue-collar, and glanced through their biographical sketches, filled with vaguely familiar names of galleries, museums, and art schools, before turning to the articles themselves.

The woman, an editor of the journal, had written a very helpful if noncommittal review of the known history of Eva Vaughn, from the first, almost unheard-of one-woman show twelve years before, which had set the art world to talking and had sold out within a week, to the recent New York show that Kate had seen with Lee. Noncommittal was not the word, Kate decided. Frustrated, perhaps. Baffled, even. The woman was certainly torn and had retreated into the safety of facts. That Eva Vaughn was a difficult person to contact, and quite impossible for a mere journalist to meet face-to-face. That her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about 'painterly' paintings (a derogatory description, Kate was surprised and amused to find). That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.

The introductory article came to an abrupt end, through poor editing or a fear on the part of the author that her objectivity was about to fail her. The other two essays, by the men, were a pro and con, which began side by side before setting off to leapfrog through the advertisements for galleries, liquors, and jewelers. After trying to keep both going at once, Kate gave it up and read the anti-Eva Vaughn first, written by the man who looked like a bricklayer, beginning it at the kitchen table and ending up in the bath.

It was like reading a technical piece in a foreign language: the words looked familiar, but she found it almost impossible to hang on to the train of thought. Individual phrases stood out, though, and the cumulative effect was one of scathing, vituperative condescension. Eva Vaughn's vision was compared with flea-market seascapes, 'Wyeth with a social conscience,' 'Grandma Moses naivete combined with Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro,' whatever that meant. As the writer became more insistent his obscurant terminology fell away like an acquired accent, until