Everything Beautiful Began After Part 14

Pain drawn out by thought.

He returned with a second gla.s.s of water. She took a gulp and put it down. He watched. Then he asked where she was from and about her childhood. She said: "My mother abandoned us." He shrugged. "Tell me a nice moment," he said. "Remember something nice for me and I'll let you paint me."

And so she let herself fall back through the past, until her memory with seeming randomness pulled a postcard from her life, and she told the story of an old piano she and her sister found washed up on a beach. They were bright little girls then, vacationing with their grandfather in rainy Deauville. The next day the piano had gone, carried back out to sea on the tide. She was especially upset. Later that night her grandfather found some paper and told her to draw it, to bring it back with her memory.

Rebecca's drawing of a piano that washed up. Age 6.

The topless man motioned with his hands upon an imaginary keyboard and then lit a cigarette. Then he offered the pack to Rebecca, and they smoked together.

As Rebecca set up the easel and unpacked her pencils, she noticed her fingers were trembling.

He remained naked from the waist up, and his flesh hung lazily from muscles that still bore the frame of muscular youth, like something beautiful in the early stages of decay. His face was poorly shaved. His cheekbones were high, almost regal.

After an hour of silence, he asked if he could smoke again. Rebecca put down her pencil and they both lit cigarettes.

"I unlucky," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Tragic things happen."

"I understand," she said. Her tragedy had been slow, whereas his needed only a few seconds.

"It was my fate," he said.

"I'm sorry for you," Rebecca said.

"Yes," he said. "Like Oedipus-it was my fate."

He lit another cigarette.

"You cannot change fate," he added.

Rebecca nodded.

"It's set, you understand? Like the weather."

Rebecca nodded again and raised her eyebrows as if she had just understood. He seemed pleased and went into the kitchen, where he began feeding towels into hungry pans of boiling water. He returned after a few minutes and sat back down.

"I'm ready," he said.

Rebecca told herself that she did not believe in fate. She believed that she alone was responsible for everything that happened to her. If there was such a thing as fate, she thought, her mother would be blameless. It would have been her fate to abandon her daughters.

But it was not her fate.

It was her decision.

Fate is for the broken, the selfish, the simple, the lost, and the forever lonely-a distant light comes no closer, nor ever completely disappears.

The topless man was a good subject, except for the occasional twitch the way a person does when falling asleep. After two more hours, he held an invisible cigarette up to his lips.

"Smoke?"

"Yes," she said. "Smoke, I'm almost finished."

Rebecca dabbed the sweat from her face with a linen scarf. He did not sweat, though his skin maintained a constant level of moisture that contrasted with the hard black of his hair.

The man held his cigarette by the neck as though it were an insect he had caught. When the paper and tobacco had burned away, he didn't stub it out, but just lay it flat in the saucer he was using as an ashtray.

After a few final strokes, Rebecca motioned for him to come around to her side of the picture.

"No," he said, shaking his finger.

"But don't you want to see how I've drawn you?"

"No," he said. "You see any mirrors in here?"

Rebecca looked around, embarra.s.sed by her sudden vanity.

She removed the paper and sprayed it with a substance that would ensure it didn't smudge. Then she packed away the easel. The man fetched her a fresh gla.s.s of water.

"You come back if you want to draw me again."

"I will," she said.

"Okay," he said.

He made her promise that she would come back.

As she was leaving, he put his hand upon her shoulder. Then he took it off.

"Wait," he said. He ran back into the apartment. Rebecca was holding the front door. She heard the slamming of cupboard doors and he was suddenly back.

"Take these," he said, thrusting a few pieces of paper into her hand.

Rebecca looked down at three children's drawings. In each one the sun dominated the sky. The people on earth were drawn as little sticks with stubby lines for limbs. Flowers as tall as people with drooping heads. Cars bouncing along in the background with stick drivers.

"I too like to make art."

Rebecca looked at them, trying to think of something to say.

He mistook her silence as awe.

"You're kind," he said. "When you come back, I make more for you."

It was late when Rebecca stepped onto the cool street. The drawing was under her arm. Her first serious work.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

She lingered momentarily below Henry's balcony, hoping that perhaps he might see her. But it was cool and walking for a while would feel good after being inside for so long.

Then a voice called out.

"Rebecca!"

"h.e.l.lo," she said, looking up.

"What are you doing?"

"Why don't you come down and get me," she said.

"Okay, let me put some clothes on."

"Don't come down, Henry, I'm coming up."

Then suddenly a voice from another balcony.

"Make your minds up! My children are trying to sleep. And let him come and get you," the voice commanded. "You shouldn't be chasing men at your age."

A pair of shutters slammed.

She entered his building and waited for the elevator. When it arrived Henry was in it wearing pajamas.

"I told you I was coming up," she said.

"But the voice-"

When they reached his floor, the door was open. From the bathroom, Rebecca could hear rushing water. She set down her easel and her drawing on the couch. Henry explained how he was trying to get a few spots of blood out of his clothes.

"Did one of your specimens come back to life?"

Henry laughed and she followed him into the bathroom, where a shirt was slung over the side of the bathtub. He kneeled down and continued scrubbing. Rebecca watched.

Henry turned off the faucet and explained what had happened.

Rebecca listened and then fetched salt and lemons.

She touched the back of Henry's head. His hair was soft. She fingered the b.u.mps of muscle between his neck and shoulder. She wondered if she would ever truly know him, if their togetherness would shape her life, or if, like the summer, he would fade into the beauty and sadness of all summers.

There was no way to know the future. At times she felt she might open to him, but then something he said, or a subtle change in mood-and she would close again, very suddenly.

In the end, they hung his sopping clothes on the balcony. Faint dark spots remained where the blood had soaked in.

Henry was very moved by her story of the topless man. He made her a sandwich with cold strips of lamb which he smothered with tzatziki.

"It felt as though he'd been waiting for me-as though he'd been waiting for someone to draw him."

Henry nodded.

"But then just as I was leaving," she went on, "I understood why he had allowed me to come in."

Rebecca showed Henry the three childlike drawings presented to her.

"Jesus," Henry said. "What are these?"

"He's an artist too," she said.

Henry gave the drawings back to Rebecca.

"He told me that he believed in the idea of fate," she said.

Henry sneered. "I'm sure he does, but the truth is probably that his wife just wasn't looking where she was going. The idea of fate is for cowards."

"I'm not sure I think that anymore," Rebecca said. "Do you know the truth of what happened to that man? Do you know what it's like to find someone you love dead in front of you?"

Henry's eyes dimmed.

"Sorry."

"It's okay," Henry said. "It was such a long time ago anyway."

"You don't have to say that."

"What do you mean?" Henry said fiercely.

"I mean that it's who you are."

Henry s.n.a.t.c.hed his winegla.s.s and smashed it against the floor. For a moment, he just stood there. Then he stepped over the broken gla.s.s and went into his bedroom.

Rebecca found the broom and cleaned up the gla.s.s. She thought about what happened. Ten minutes pa.s.sed. Then she saw Henry standing in the doorway.

She continued sweeping.

"Did I scare you?"

She nodded.

"Are you going to tell your mother I turned out to be crazy?"

"No," Rebecca said plainly, "because my mother abandoned Natalie and me when we were seven."