Frank rifled through several cabinets before he found a nail. Then he hammered it into the wall, and together he and Karen lifted the painting onto it, then stepped back to take in the effect.
“Very nice,” Karen said. She looked at him. “It brightens the room.”
“Yes, it does.”
Karen continued to look at it for a moment, then walked over to the window, parted the blinds and peered out. “I was happy when I painted that,” she said.
Frank walked over to her. “You can tell you were,” he said.
The first wave of rain suddenly swept down over the city, and a gust blew it forcefully against the window pane.
“I want a storm,” Karen said, “I want a wild, booming storm.”
“Maybe you should paint one,” Frank said.
She turned toward him. “Do you think a single afternoon can make a difference?”
“For that afternoon, yes,” Frank said. And then he drew her into his arms.
24
It was late in the evening before Karen left, and as Frank sat on his sofa, staring at her painting, he could still feel the warmth of her body as it had clung to him hungrily hour after hour. She had talked once again of leaving this city full of ghosts, and as he continued to gaze at the painting, it struck him that she had not painted the flowers themselves, or the almost translucent blue vase that held them, but the airy ghosts of these things. It was as if she had been able to feel the slowly fading pulse of each leaf and petal, and it was this overall sense of steadily departing life which she had captured.
He had bought the painting because it was hers, and because he thought it might brighten the space around him. But now he could see nothing but its sorrowfulness, its mournful sense of departure and farewell.
He walked into the kitchen and fixed himself a quick meal of beans and nearly burnt bacon. He ate it with a single slice of white bread. It was a joyless, bachelor’s fare, he realized, and each mouthful tasted of a life that had itself turned utterly flavorless.
He returned to the living room and once again sat down on the sofa. He felt the need to view his life as some kind of whole, as if it could be captured in a single tone or color. But nothing held firm. Nothing but his work, his pursuit—however blind and full of error—of something which could be called justice, or at least, retribution. People had to pay for what they did, and he was one of the ones who made them pay. It was the badge which gave him the right to do that, and he suddenly found that he wanted to cling to it with all his remaining strength. Nothing could bring back Sarah or Angelica or Ollie Quinn, or any of the scores of others whose bodies lay torn and broken in his memory, but whose spirits still moved sleeplessly through him. They were more real to him than all the living who crowded the streets and buses. They lived more fully in his mind, and their flesh was warmer and more tangible. It bled and bled, as if the one great heart of all the unjustly dead still beat on through the ages, their cries still ringing out through time, heard like a low moan in the ground, or like a scream echoing above it.
He took a bottle from the cupboard, returned to the sofa and took a long, slow drink. Its warmth moved down into him, and he could feel its comfort settling in. He started to take another, but stopped himself. He knew that if he took another, then he’d take another after that and still another, until the world grew hazy around him, and he would find himself on the floor in the morning, the stink of his own breath in his nose, and feeling so tightly wrapped in his own skin that he could hardly breathe without splitting open and spilling his insides across the plain wooden floor.
He put the bottle down on the little table beside the sofa and glanced up at the painting. The afternoon had stretched into the night, but nothing that had happened had convinced her not to go. She was leaving, like everything else, and so it seemed that only his work mattered. Everything else went away. Children and wives, and women who loved for a few sweet hours and then took planes to distant cities. The painting was right; everything lived in a certain stage of fading. What lasted was what you did, your work. Everything else was a phantom.
He reached for his notebook and started to go through it. He flipped one page, then another, his eyes combing each line intently, as if something might be drawn from even the most routine details. He noted the abandoned lot, the rusting car, the beautiful body laid out in its shallow grave. He read about guardians and trust funds, private schools and plays, dreams of acting and plans to leave for New York. One by one, the pages fell away. He read and read and read about a little girl’s room, a telephone that was used only once, a date, May 15. He read about pregnancy and a late-night ride through Grant Park. He parked with her again at the Cyclorama, then left with her and drove up and down some obscure street. Then he went with her to an alley and made love to her joylessly, and with a frantic anger. He searched her closet again, and found none of the clothes she’d been seen wearing at various places in the city. His finger moved through the neatly arranged skirts and blouses, still looking for the frilly laces and black velvets that were the costumes of her secret life. He talked to a dying painter once again, and then to the woman who had loved him futilely all her life. He listened to her song of art, to her efforts to find her artists certain dignified forms of work, touch-ups, restorations. He read again and again, until the words dissolved into one black line, and, at last, he fell asleep.
Thunder awakened him. It came from far away and lingered in the air, rolling heavily over the city in a deep baritone groan.
He walked to the window and looked out. It had stopped raining, but he could tell by the thick feel of the air that it was about to begin again, hard and heavy, a jungle torrent. He thought of the animals in the zoo at Grant Park, soaked in their thick fur, their eyes staring vacantly at the deserted grounds. He could feel his mind wandering through the zoo, then over the grassy knoll that bordered it, and across the wet swamp to where the Cyclorama rested with immense heaviness on the bare earth. He could see the rain-soaked area around the building, the sea of mud which no doubt now encircled the great granite edifice. That was the only place she had stopped that night, the only place she had lingered. She had pulled up to the storm fence, glancing occasionally into her rearview mirror, and then straight ahead again, her eyes fixed on the far corner of the building.
He released the blind and it clattered shut. Then he walked out onto his porch and peered out toward the park. He couldn’t see it from where he was, but he knew it was there, swept with rain, deserted except for the few homeless souls who clung to shelter beneath the enormous trees. Some of those same trees rose gracefully around the Cyclorama, and he could see Angelica as she sat beneath them, thinking of her next move. It had been to leave the park and ride up and down a particular street a few times and then drive directly to the alley. He tried to put all these things in their proper, sequential order: stopped at the Cyclorama, waited for a few minutes, then drove to a street and went back and forth along it for a few minutes, and then, after that, headed for the alley. It seemed to Frank that Angelica had made her decision to go to the alley only after she had not been able to find what she was looking for on that street. But which street was it? He flipped through his notes, found Stan Doyle, Jr.’s phone number, and called him immediately.
“Hello?”
“Stan, this is Frank Clemons.”
“Oh,” the boy sputtered. “Yeah, right.”
“I need a little help.”
“Like what?”
“I want to drive you around the Grant Park area for a few minutes.”
“But I told you everything I knew.”
“I want you to show me exactly where you and Angelica went that night.”
The boy seemed to consider it for a moment. “Well, okay,” he said at last.
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour,” Frank said. He walked to his car, glancing back toward the house as he pulled himself in. Something stirred in him suddenly, and as he continued to look back at the old house, he realized that he had always sensed a strange grief all around it, as if some ancient wrong had seeped into it and was still there, absorbed into the woodwork, held there forever like a deep, abiding stain.
Stan ran hurriedly out to the car as Frank pulled into the driveway.
“My daddy’s due back tomorrow morning,” he said breathlessly. “I’ve been trying to clean up all the mess.”
