Florabelle Gist and Dez Keener with popsicles, Washington Square August 1954. Photographed by Eve Arnold.
THURSDAY, 23 AUGUST 1956. NEW YORK CITY.
“Well, how much is it worth?” She hadn’t looked up from her coffee in a minute and a half.
“Betty Parsons figures it’s worth ten thousand,” he said. “But that’s no relation to what it’ll sell for. Not now. I looked at her receipts from five years ago—Pollock, when he sold at all, sold for four grand, maybe five for a big one. Two days ago, Ben Heller bought one for thirty-two grand. Morbid provenance and encaustics and all, this one could go for fifty.”
She looked up and nodded. It occurred to Dez that her face hadn’t registered anger with him—or much of anything—for a while, now. Days, weeks? What was it, then? Disappointment, exhaustion, a few more down there he didn’t want to dig for. In the dimness of the Cedar Tavern on University Place her irises and her pupils and the curl over her left eye were all the same shade of black. She cocked her neck back and looked up at the ceiling, as much to get the hair out of her eyes as to avoid, he thought, having to look at him any longer.
“If it goes through, I was thinking we could buy Ted’s place up in the Catskills,” he offered. “If he’s still selling.”
He watched her eyes move over the dark confines of the bar. Two booths over, a man wore a rabbit fur coat despite the sweltering heat. A man at the same booth wore a bad red toupee. There was no one else, besides the barman.
“Ted? Your old co-pilot?” She seemed to be barely listening, having a more important conversation with herself which he couldn’t take any part in.
“I know you love that place. It’d be great to have a place we could get away from the city whenever we—”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Dez.” The beginnings and the endings of her sentences, the silken drawl, still belonged to the prairie. The High Plains, that expansive kingdom—they had, all those people, thought of her as their royalty. Their princess of the High Prairie. He’d long ago shed whatever remained of his accent, through sheer willpower and lack of sentiment. Nobody back there claimed him like they claimed her.
“Don’t buy that place on my account,” she whispered. “Don’t steal this painting, don’t—”
“Wait a second, wait a second.”
She waited a beat, opened her eyes, looked him over. He worried she saw nothing she loved. He saw only dark, deep spaces between her pupils and the reflection of the bar lights.
He looked away. “It’s her painting, Toffee. I’m not stealing anything.”
She nodded and pursed her lips. She just didn’t care anymore, anyhow. She hadn’t decided on it, it had found her like the tides reclaiming a stretch of sand. Everything was drowned, and the only cause was cosmic.
“Look, she’s only paying me to help her find it. Someone stole it from her, you can’t—you can’t fault me for helping her get it back”
“And that business last year?”
“I told you I was done with it. There’s plenty of trade for this kind of thing. You told me you wouldn’t stand for that anymore, and I haven’t done it.”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” she sighed. He could tell, even in the dimness, that she was close to tears, close to breaking. “It’s all of it, Dez. This fellow died, this big important painter. And all the better because now we can have a place in the Catskills. It’s been like that a while now.”
He sighed into his cigaret, “Yeah.” The barman brought another Heaven Hill.
“I remember the first time I ever saw you,” she said. She was smiling, something not happiness, something celestial—a sadness that played in her eyes with the bar lights. “I was seven. You were nine or ten. I whispered to my daddy, He’s so pretty!” She laughed to herself, probably more for her father than him. Her eyes traced a long scar that ran from behind his left ear down to his shoulder blade. “Lend me a cigaret, Beau.”
He fished one from the packet and lit it for her. “Texhoma,” he sang the word, that name holding infinite meaning, infinite memory, for each of them.
“You were tricking Sam Myrick out of one of his marbles by making him guess which hand it was in.”
“Sammy Myrick was an idiot.” They both laughed.
“I tried to make you give it back to him. But you said no, because—”
“Because Sam Myrick had a whole bag full of marbles.”
Her smile faded. “You want a bag of marbles yourself.”
The man in the rabbit fur coat approached their booth, the little hairpieced fellow lingering behind him in the darkness, stumbling a little in his elevator shoes. The first fellow was very handsome, deeply suntanned with a thin frame and fine bones and curly dark hair and a cleft chin that looked like he shaved it twice a day, smeared it with axle grease after. When he stepped from the shadows into the bar lights, Dez saw it was Fernie Legros.
He extended his hand and spoke with a foreign accent. “I only wanted to say hello, Dez.”
“Hi, Fernie. This is Miss Gist.”
“Charming.”
Without another word, he and the other man filed toward the door. The tavern was momentarily lit by sunlight, the doorway a bright white rectangle of afternoon.
“I love the Village,” she said. They laughed again, together.
He stubbed out his cigaret and waved the smoke away. “You’re going to leave me, Florabelle.”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. She rubbed her bare shoulders. She wore a lavender satin dress belted at her waist. Something new he’d never seen before. She cocked her head again, tossing back her hair. It was pinned neatly at the sides. Wild, it ran curly. Her neck was small, olive hued like the rest of her. She smiled at him, genuine this time, but deficient something that certainly used to be there. “I need to get back to the lab.”
“Swingin’ down to Guatemala City.”
“Yep. Communist agitation,” she said, inflecting imaginary quotation marks. “I pitched it as workers revolt, but we’ll see if they go for that.”
“But they’re paying for it, the magazine. They must like it.”
“As long as I come back with some pretty pictures of the natives and the beaches.”
“So, you’re the only one allowed to take pictures.” The joke fell flat.
“It’s a respectable living, Dez.”
“Like flying, or something.”
She placed a small hand on his. It was the first time she’d touched him that day. He imagined he could feel the blood rushing into and out of his heart, like an old rusty pail in a big, cold river. “I know you can’t do that,” she whispered.
“And I know you wish I could.”
“That isn’t fair. It was me—,” she caught on a sob. She cleared her throat and started again. “It was me who met you here when you got back. Little girl you grew up with, college fling you thought you’d forgot about. That was me, Beau. Standing on the pier when your boat came in. Crying into a handkerchief when they carried you down the gangway. I never in a million years thought it’d be you begging me to stay.”
“I ain’t begging,” he managed to say. It was the voice of a snot-nosed kid, in full drawl, shoulders bowed from growing too quickly on too little to eat, skin browned by Panhandle sun, bare feet black, side-stepping mesquite thorns, conning marbles.
In the darkness of the tavern, he barely saw her leave. He felt it more than saw it.
Cedar Street Tavern, 1956.
FRIDAY, 24 AUGUST 1956. NINEVAH BEACH, SAG HARBOR, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK.
An hour before dawn, just as the light crept up, the crickets took over Sag Harbor and a discordant harmony of gulls crossed Long Island’s little Darktown, making for the shore. Dez Keener sat on a stump in Dale Glass’s yard—to the neighbors a mysterious gray silhouette of a Stetson Continental and a Viceroy Filter King. The gulls gradually faded and the morning glowed along the horizon, and down the dirt-and-seashell street, coming out of a silver sliver of sunlight, rolled Dale Glass’s blue prewar DeSoto Custom. Dez tossed his cigaret into the road and stood with his hands on his hips and Glass glided into the drive.
Glass killed his headlamps and just sat there. After a while he flicked his cigaret out the window, rolled it up, and walked over.
“I don’t have to talk to you, I know how this works.”
“Now, don’t go fogging the place up.”
Glass looked around the street of small shingled cottages. Dez followed his gaze—no one else stirring yet. A street over, gears grinding—probably the milkman.
“You better come in anyway.”
The living room was filled with worn but tidy furnishings—all vaguely Queen Anne, knockoffs from Woolworths or Western Auto, spread out on a rug faded to the color of dust. A big radio, twenty years old at least, bulked in the corner. No television.
“I got most of it from my ma when she passed,” said Glass.
“Your application for East Hampton P. D. said you grew up in Locust Manor. Not a bad place. By the racetrack. I sometimes play the horses, when there’s nothing else to do.”
Glass took a can of Champale out of the icebox, offered one to Dez.
“Too early for me.”
Glass popped the can open with a pocketknife. He ran past lean to scrawny, a little under six feet tall. His belt gapped around his waist as he hiked up his pants and settled into the sofa. “It’s eveningtime for me.”
Light peeked in from behind the heavy curtains above the living room’s only window. There was a kitchen at the back of a house with a second window, another door off to the side, a single bedroom.
“There was two of us, two academy Negroes,” said Glass, “that applied for the job.”
“Don’t say.”
“Other fellow was a lot bigger than me. Would have made a good ballplayer or a fighter.” Glass kicked off his boots and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his uniform shirt. “That’s why they picked me. They needed a Negro, appearances’ sake. But you couldn’t have one so big as you can’t control him. Told me as much.”
A billow of dust moved out of the darkness toward him, into the beams of his headlamps. The woman from the front seat, stripped to the waist, a swimsuit half torn from her body, still wearing her kerchief, her face and torso covered in the dirt road caked in her own blood, crawled out of the cloud and into the light. He swallowed hard, killed the engine, and stepped out of the Ford.
She stopped crawling and gasped out a wheeze, twitching as she collapsed the rest of the way down. Blood from somewhere under her armpit pooled beneath her, making mud out of the roadway. She rolled onto her back. Her breasts were scratched and lacerated, black blood white fat pink skin. “Jackson,” she moaned.
He moved carefully toward her. “Ma’am, ma’am,” he tried. She went on moaning, delirious, her blood-matted hair flopping about as she tossed her head from side to side, waking herself from a nightmare. He saw the source of most of the blood—her left side beneath the swimsuit. “Ma’am,” he tried again. He tore her swimsuit down the seam and exposed a deep gash, the white of a broken rib poking out. The blood stopped at her waist but started up again somewhere down her leg—what was left of her slacks was matted down.
“Jackson,” she moaned.
He picked her up as gently as he could and moved her a few feet closer to the Ford, out of the roadway. He sprinted down to the embankment at the bend of the road, his flashlight beam bobbing, his other hand holding down his sidearm in its holster. He stood for a moment atop the embankment, service shoes sinking into the soft dirt. The beam flickered around in the trees, impenetrable blackness beyond. The Olds was a crumpled mess, belly up, one wheel still spinning. A small, bare white foot poked up from underneath the car body. He crouched down and saw a young woman, brown, maybe black hair was about the only feature he could make out in a pulpy black mass, but it was a woman. Her head was snapped violently to the side, almost decapitated. Black blood everywhere. He beamed the light around the front seat, but there was no one else in there.
He ran back to the roadway and checked the wounded woman’s pulse. He could see her chest moving up and down and she was breathing all right, but her pulse was fifty-something and slowing. He grabbed the radio in the Ford and put out the call.
The sun was all the way up, now, beaming a thin line onto Dale Glass’s living room wall.
“Fact is,” said Dez, “I make you for about twenty, twenty-five minutes by yourself with the Olds. Before the wrecker or the ambulance or anyone else showed up.”
“That’s about right,” said Glass, poking into his second can of Champale.
“Look, I don’t guess I’ve got the stomach for making your life any harder than it is.” Dez stood and lit himself a Filter King. He looked around the room. Clouds moved in, rain spattered on the roof, dripped in sheets from the gutter above the window. “Fact is, I don’t relish it. And it sure doesn’t look like you’ve fenced it.”
Glass didn’t even look up. “Fenced what?”
Dez nodded. “I don’t guess I’ll bother you again,” he said, and left.
He got a surplus-gray wool blanket from the boot of the Ford and wrapped her in it the best he could. The same blankets they’d given them during the war, not for themselves but for their trucks’ cargo, pine boxes of mortar shells and hand grenades, so they wouldn’t jostle against one another on the muddy, potholed roads of Holland. He held her from behind, applying pressure to the wound on her left side. He didn’t want to sit with her like that, hardly any clothes on, could only wonder whether or not the situation excused it—some white man, the wrecker or ambulance driver, finding him holding her like that, stripped half naked. But he was afraid she’d die otherwise, and that was worse.
A siren wound up somewhere far-off, carrying through the trees and along the shoreline. It seemed to wake her.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“Shh, they’re on their way.”
“You have to do something for me.”
“Just lie still, ma’am. You can hear help coming.”
“You have to do it.”
She was calming now, coming to, and he had to think about how things would be if she didn’t die. He had to put every foot carefully, just in case, from here on out.
“There’s a painting, a canvas, in the car, in the boot.”
“We’ll make sure you get it, just be still and wait.”
“Please, look at me.”
He laid her down in the beam of the Ford’s headlamps and looked her in her eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I know they’re coming. I know I’ll live. And I know you’ll help me.”
The siren was closer, now.
“Go now,” she whispered.
He drained his can of Champale and rubbed his eyes. He unbuttoned his uniform shirt the rest of the way and when he was down to his trousers and undershirt, he laid back on his bed and closed his eyes again. After a minute he sat up on the end of the bed and looked at himself in the dresser mirror. A flame-white line of rainy sunshine from the bedroom window framed him from above and he was only a silhouette to himself.
He bent over and reached between his legs and slid the painting out. It was still wrapped in the torn brown paper.
Notel and the sergeant stood on either side of Glass, their hands on their hips. The woman, hastily bandaged about the torso and the pelvis, her breasts covered with a white sheet, was being loaded into the back of the ambulance by men in white shirts and trousers. Farther down the roadway, the sound of the wrecker’s engine getting intermittent gas as it backed up the embankment. Flash bulbs twinkled in binary rhythm, beaming off two white sheets draping the bodies laid in the roadway.
She was lucid now, and the shock having worn off, was shivering and shaking and crying out as they loaded her in. “He saved me,” she said. “The Negro, he saved me. Thank you, thank you.” The technicians closed the doors. One of them nodded toward Glass, a brief approbation. Glass wiped his hands on his uniform shirt. The blood stains were the same color as his skin in the half-light.
The sergeant offered Glass his paper cup of coffee. “Here, son. You might need this.” Notel clapped Glass on the back.
“There’s a little whisky in there for you,” said the sergeant.
Dale Glass, 1955.
SATURDAY, 25 AUGUST 1956. NEW YORK CITY.
The taxi ride to Idlewild was silent except for the sputter of off-time pistons and the burr of tires on rain-slicked streets. Through the Xes of strutwork on the Williamsburg Bridge, early morning tugs plied the East River, their funnels belching fumes like the blacked faces of drowning men smoking last cigarets.
He carried her bags across the runway and they stood at the foot of the stairs that led up to a DC-7 bound for Mexico City. Little Mexican flags were tied to the handrails. He dug the ball of his shoe into the tarmacadam and ground out his Filter King. “I guess you don’t know how long you’ll be.”
“Truth is, I’m not sure I’m coming back. Maybe not for a while.”
The breeze unpinned her curls and she held them out of her face. He nodded and avoided looking directly at her.
“After Guatemala, hopefully there’ll be another assignment. And I’d like to go back and see Daddy if I can,” an apology in her voice, not because she was leaving him but because there was nothing back there for him, no one to visit, no one who wondered about him in her letters.
He nodded again, tried to light another cigaret but the breeze wasn’t having it. He tossed it to the ground.
“I think I’d like it if you kissed me goodbye, Beau.”
He made himself look at her and immediately remembered why he’d avoided it.
“One time when I was little,” he said, “Daddy and me, we’d gone out riding on the property.” He cleared his throat. “You remember how he was.”
She nodded. “Big, in my memory. Big hands. Horsehide face.” She smiled and touched his arm.
“He saw this calf, stuck in a bramble on the neighbor’s side of the fence, her ma prowling back and forth behind. He jumped off and ran to help it, told me to stay where I was so I wouldn’t get cut up. Cut himself up real bad. I see him in the middle of it, funny to me as a little kid till I saw what he’d done to himself. Red lines and white showing in places where it got him deep to fat. When Leticia was done with him, he smelled like witchhazel and turpentine for days.”
She laughed a little. He finally got a Filter King lit, dragged deep. The clouds were gone and the sun was behind the big steel fuselage and he couldn’t see her anymore.
“He told me it’s every man’s duty—no matter if it’s yours or not. You cut it loose if you see it needs it.”
She put a first foot on the stairs. “Bye, sport,” she said, squinting up at him.
“Goodbye, Florabelle,” he said, and turned and walked back toward the terminal.
He took the train back. Howard Beach all the way to the Village, two hours in a sweltering steel armpit, smoked an entire packet of Viceroy Filter Kings and tried to remember. Tried to quiz himself on things she’d told him, important things, how she’d felt, what she’d seen. Where she’d gone on this assignment and that. Tried to prove to himself he could do it, but he couldn’t.
Things like the stray cats of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane, rival gangs in her fancy, collectively her Cattachine Society. He remembered she’d really gotten a kick out of it, ascribing each cat a specific personality and preferences, naming them all. He tried to remember the names, but he’d never learned them.
Dez Keener, 1952, with a cat named Katz. Photographed by Florabelle Gist.
“Much as you might want to call it a curve, Miss Parsons, we’re at a dead end together.”
Dez Keener breathed the aromas of Little West 12th Street through the open window—hot offal and slaughterhouse blood, Hudson river funk after a rain, soap flakes and Jockeys drying on the line. Across the street in a ground floor apartment, a rehearsing calypso band beat out a sloppy roadmarch—creole harmonies and pot-pan drums. He sat behind his desk dosing Heaven Hill into his coffee cup, listening to the muted trumpet over the whir of the desk fan. He drank the cup half empty and dosed it again. The little fan whirred and oscillated, swaying Betty Parson’s silver bob like a bead curtain.
“I know it,” she said.
“He’s got it, sure enough. If it exists, he’s the one who’s got it.”
“Here,” she said, and slid a photograph across to him. Lee Krasner—Dez had seen her once with Pollock at Cedar’s bar—sat cross-legged on a milking stool. Betty Parsons leaned on her shoulder. Jackson Pollock, bent over in a deep lunge, drizzled liquid from a can marked Western Auto onto a canvas at his feet.
“He called it: the Number Twenty-Five,” she whispered ceremoniously. “It was a gift, between friends.” She intoned quotation marks, “Something to hang in the upstairs bathroom.”
He placed the photograph down on the desk. “Probably Miss Kligman, too,” he muttered. He was talking more to himself than to her, now. He studied the far wall, followed along with the titles on the bookcase. Light peeked in from under, somewhere beyond—the bookcase was also the door to where he slept now. He spoke absent-mindedly in the rhythm of no attention. He remembered a neglected Filter King in the ashtray and snatched it up, dragged with his eyes closed. He rubbed his temple with his cigaret hand, brushed ash from the photograph.
“It wouldn’t seem possible,” muttered Betty.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, that she had anything to do with it. In her condition. Much as I hate to admit it—” she trailed off.
“Something to hang in the upstairs bathroom,” he mused. The people in the photograph had each other, cared for each other—it was in the orientation of their bodies, a wholesome Rockwellian composition. He cleared his throat and stubbed out his cigaret, looked her over again. “We could get some muscle. That’s about the last option in these situations. Wreck his place up, threaten him.” He arched his neck back. “Though by now, if he had it there in Ninevah Beach, he’s surely moved it since our talk together.”
“Would you do that yourself?” She looked down at her lap. “Rough him up.”
“No.” He felt his mind parse a phrase, ready for use, I ain’t gonna do that no more. “I don’t have any appetite for that kind of thing,” is what came out.
She stood and offered her small hand. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Keener. Sincerely.”
“O. K.”
When she was gone he closed his eyes and laid his head back. He followed his thoughts back as far as they would lead him, they were two little kids, hand in hand, chasing down a dry runnel.
SUNDAY, 14 DECEMBER 1941. SHERMAN COUNTY, TEXAS.
Livinus Keener’s voice was still the same, low and powerful. But it was soft and carefully paced, now, like a deer crossing a stream. His face was stretched like an army tent over his cheekbones, his arms were as thin as a woman’s, the big voice and the big hands the only parts of him that hadn’t withered away. Lumps protruded from the deep clefts of his collarbone, another stuck out from beneath his jaw. Dez closed his eyes and his father’s voice was still the same, heavy above the hiss of the pampas grass and the rattle of the dried cotton bolls, and the song of the cowbirds and cactus wrens, the thousand harmonies of the Panhandle wind.
“You know I never liked it, R. D. I guess I always figured I would go and visit you, see for myself. Chillicothe,” he coughed.
“You couldn’t have stood it, Pop. There’s no dirt anywhere.”
“There’s grime. Better give me one of those.” Dez passed his father his cigaret and lit another for himself.
A photograph hung above the bed, a small oval of a dark woman, gaunt from Spanish flu, sitting in a field of Indian blankets, a baggy dress drawn up around her ankles. She was smiling.
“You think you’ll go into the war?”
“I don’t know, Pop.”
“You’ll be your own business, now.”
“You’re so sure you’re a goner.”
He laughed but the laugh was different, smaller and softer. It reminded Dez of a train whistle far in the distance—you knew it was powerful and loud, somewhere, but it was far away, farther each time you heard it. “You’ll have a war,” said Liv. “I heard the Mexicans talking about it in the yard. So, be careful.”
There was a knock at the front door. They were at the far end of the house but it was a small house and you could hear everything from one side to the other. “That’ll be Florabelle Gist,” said his father, sitting up and easing his feet off the bed. “She’s still down at the College of Mines, Old Tobin said she was home for the holiday. How many years was she behind you?”
Dez stood and patted his father’s knee. “She must be class of ‘43, Pop. Why don’t you lie back down, I’ll get the door.”
“Just get me that water there and I’ll sleep. She’s bringing something over, but don’t make me eat it. And don’t let her make me, or I’m liable to be sick. I want her to know I’m grateful, but I don’t feel I can eat right now.”
“Sweet dreams, Pop.”
“And get me that radio so I can see if there’s a Oilers-Gassers on.”
“They don’t play till spring, Pop.”
“All right, I forgot.”
The last thing he saw in the room as he shut the door were his father’s khaki trousers, stained in dirt colors down the front, ironed to a crease like he liked them. It was probably Leticia who had ironed them months before, a widow woman who had looked after Liv and the house when Dez went away. Now Liv had sent her away, too—a cat who crawled up under the house, away and dark, to die in peace and dignity. The trousers were folded neatly over the back of the chair, ready for him when he was ready to work again.
Dez closed the door. He could see her shadow in the hall.
Westfield Women’s Reformatory, 1956.
SATURDAY, 27 OCTOBER 1956. WESTFIELD PRISON FARM, BEDFORD HILLS, NEW YORK.
When class was over, Miss Kligman and Miss Freilicher, sent up from the city by the Art Students League, packed up their pastels and easels and rinsed their brushes in the porcelain sink. Their demonstrational painting, completed with patient instruction by both women, was of the landscape viewed from the prison’s post office window, which the prisoners had been facing. It showed raised beds of neat rows of eggplants, squash and sweet corn, and a high barbed wire and steel-linked fence, and beyond, a scrap metal yard and a gravel pit giving way to a heavily wooded valley with a wisp of silver running through it. This last detail, finished with a flourish by Miss Kligman, brought applause from the women prisoners, and a fond exclamation from Miss Robinson, supervisor of homemaking, “Oh! Why, it’s Beaverdam Creek. Brava!” And there was more applause when the painting was presented, on behalf of the League, to Superintendent Additon, to be hung in the prison cafeteria. And a packet of brushes and paints and one small blank canvas for each of the girls who had attended the class.
When they were all packed up, Miss Freilicher started toward the parking lot with the easels—Miss Kligman seemed to have something of a limp and Miss Freilicher carried the heavy pieces. A young woman about Miss Kligman’s age, or a little younger—maybe 24 or 25—tapped her on the shoulder and offered a paper cup of coffee.
“Thanks!” said Ruth, happily. “What’d you think? My first time.”
“You did great!” She wore the same denim frock as the other prisoners, hands buried in the patch pockets on the front. She had dark hair in a loose ponytail, and a big, pretty smile. “Are you a famous artist in New York?”
“Well, no. Not yet, at least.”
“It’s very good.”
“Well, thank you.”
“My name’s Alma Malone,” the name rolled off her tongue like the chorus of a country and western tune.
She offered her hand. “Ruth Kligman.”
“I bet there are all kinds of famous painters in New York.”
“That’s true, ever heard of Jackson Pollock?”
Alma shook her head, no.
“Oh. Well he was a big one.”
“Was?”
“Well, he’s dead now.” Ruth traced one of her bright red fingernails along a bright red scar, a skinny line that paralleled her collarbone. A line of red dots arched above her left eyebrow.
“Did you know him?”
Ruth didn’t answer right away. “Yeah. Yep,” she said.
“New York sounds wonderful. I just envy you so much, I guess.”
“Well, I better catch my train.”
“Well, I just wanted to say hi.”
“It was very nice to meet you, Alma.”
When Alma turned to go Ruth said, “Say, I’ll tell you what. Maybe I’ll give you my address and you could write to me, like pen pals.”
“I’d like that,” said Alma, and smiled even bigger. Miss Robinson supplied the pencil and an index card.
SUNDAY, 28 OCTOBER 1956. NINEVAH BEACH, SAG HARBOR, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK.
The sun had finally set and it was cool in the room. Outside, the crickets were starting up. She switched on the lamp and climbed out of his bed.
“I told you I wanted to thank you,” she said, and kissed him on the chin on all his day-off stubble.
She went to the foot of the bed and crouched down so he couldn’t see her. She stood back up, still naked, holding the painting they’d stolen. It was about a foot wide by three feet long, still partially wrapped in torn brown paper, angry golds and ambers and cherrylight red shooting out where the paper showed through. She propped it up on the dresser and smiled, watching him in the mirror.
“I’m glad you’re going to be O. K.,” he said.
“You saved my life,” she said, still looking at him in the mirror. There was a knock at the door. “That’s my cab,” she said happily, smile beaming. “Just a minute!” she called.
He lit a cigaret, nodded toward the painting. “I hope it brings you the kind of life you want.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want anything for it.”
“I’ve already been well paid,” he said, and smiled back at her in the mirror.
She turned and laughed, breasts bobbing, blue veins like lightning in a cloud, hands playing in the dark hair at her shoulders. Scars crossed her sides and her abdomen. She dressed demonstratively, skipping the stockings, rolling them up and stuffing them in her handbag. She clipped her earrings back on and said to the mirror, “There’s just one more thing.”
She fished in her purse and took out a small camera, a green plastic Imperial Savoy. It looked like a kid’s toy.
“No,” he said.
“Say insurance!” she sang, and snapped a photo in the mirror:
Ruth Kligman, in the foreground, white teeth gathering up all the light. Former East Hampton police officer Dale Glass, the dark figure in the background, sprawled on the bed, bottom half blurry where he had tried to pull the bedsheet up.