She shook her head. “It started out as a business. This would turn it into a hobby, and what the hell do I need with a hobby. You remember the joke?”
“The guy with the bees?”
“Thousand upon thousands of bees, and he lives in two rooms on Pitkin Avenue. ‘Charlie, where do you keep them?’ ‘In a cigar box.’ ‘Don’t they get all crushed, jammed together like that?’ ‘Hey, fuck it, it’s only a hobby.’ Well, I don’t want a hobby.”
At the morning star, I considered the question while the waitress came by and took our order. Then I said, “Does she miss it? Yes, I suppose she does. She never finds herself with time on her hands, she doesn’t lack for things to do, but she took an empty storefront and turned it into a wonderful reflection of herself.”
“Every square foot of it,” he said, “was Elaine.”
“And she got a kick out of finding something that nobody would look twice at and revealing it to be a work of art. One of her thrift shop specials turned out to be a Paint-by-Numbers masterpiece.”
“She didn’t spot that when she bought it?”
“She just liked the looks of it, and the Salvation Army wanted something like fifteen or twenty dollars for it, so she wasn’t about to x-ray it. She bought it and brought it home. A week or so later a customer picked it up and said it looked to her like Paint-by-Numbers. Our girl didn’t miss a beat. ‘A perfect example of Outsider Art,’ she said. ‘This particular artist used Paint-by-Numbers as his jumping-off point. And do you see what he’s done with it?’ ”
He nodded. “Anybody would miss moments like that,” he said.
“She misses the action,” I said, “and the stimulation. The give and take of it. Retail can be a nightmare, you’re at the mercy of any ambulatory psychotic who walks in off the street, but she thrived on it. And once in a while she wound up working with a real artist.”
“Jury’s still out on that.”
“Every time she sold a sketch of yours, and every time she got you a portrait commission, you’d think she’d just won the Nobel Prize. When she decided to close the shop, even before she told the landlord, she was looking for somebody to step up and rep you.”
“I remember how I got the news. ‘Ray, this is Johanna Huberman, she’s got a small gallery on upper Madison Avenue, and she’ll be able to represent your work far better than I can. Oh, by the way, I’ve decided to close the shop.’ ”
“That sounds about right. Are you still with—”
“Johanna? I am, and Elaine chose well. We’ve got good chemistry. It’s a slow way to get rich, but Jesus, Matt, I’m a professional artist. It’s how I make my living. How the hell did that happen?”
We sat over coffee while I told him what he needed to know about Ellen. That didn’t include her vocational history, or how Elaine happened to know her. They were in a group together, I said, and they’d gotten friendly over the months, and the younger woman had brought her problem to Elaine.
That problem, of course, was the putative Paul, who was transformed in the telling from a client of hers to a nut job who’d decided they were soulmates on the strength of a single dinner date. As far as she was concerned, one awkward evening was more than enough, but Paul didn’t see it that way.
“So he’s stalking her,” he said.
“He’s trying to. She moved out of her apartment, found another place to stay for the time being. She may have to change her phone number, but so far she hasn’t.”
“And he calls?”
“Early and often.”
“She been to the police?”
“No, and I was going to send her there but I couldn’t think what she could tell them. She doesn’t know his last name, and she’s not sure he gave her the right first name.”
“Paul, you said.”
“Right.”
“Probably married,” he said. “That’d explain not giving his real name. But that doesn’t fit with the stalking, does it?”
“You wouldn’t think so, but—”
“But maybe it does. If he’s obsessed with her, all bets are off. There’s a word for it.”
“Stalking?”
“Erotomania. It’s more than an obsession, it’s the conviction that they’ve got a real relationship with the stalkee, if that’s a word. Sometimes it’s a public figure and they’ve never even met in real life. Like that woman they caught breaking into David Letterman’s house.”
“That was a while ago.”
“Years,” he said. “If she turned up again, I don’t know who she’d get fixated on. Colbert, I suppose. Or one of the Jimmies.”
“Past my bedtime.”
“Not me. I’m still a night owl, but I don’t watch talk shows anymore. I have to say I miss David Letterman.”
“You could always break into his house,” I said. “He’d probably be happy to see you.”
When we got to the apartment, Ellen was sitting on the couch in the living room, her shoes off, wearing slacks and a sweater. I’d managed introductions by the time Elaine came in from the kitchen with a plate of shortbread cookies. Elaine told Ray how well he looked, and he told her she was as lovely as ever, and she put the plate of cookies on the coffee table, where no one paid any attention to them. Elaine told Ellen it had been worth running the shop just to be able to offer Ray’s work, and Ray told Ellen how Elaine had discovered him. “But it wasn’t like discovering America,” he said, “or a new planet.”
Elaine told him he was modest to a fault, and he said he had a lot to be modest about, and then the air went out of the small talk. Ray unzipped his portfolio and took out a sketch pad and a pencil case, and Elaine said, “Well, you two have work to do. The light’s better in the front room.”
When they were out of range, she said, “I hope this works. She didn’t want to come.”
“Why not?”
“She’s afraid it won’t work. And it’ll be her fault.”
‘It’ll probably work just fine.”
“I know.”
“And it won’t be anybody’s fault if it doesn’t.”
“I know that, too. Nobody touched the cookies.”
“Until now,” I said, and ate one.
“I don’t know why I feel compelled to do that.”
“Bring out food?”
“It’s the most Jewish thing about me. What?”
“ ‘What?’ ”
“You were about to say something.”
I took another cookie. “These don’t taste particularly Jewish,” I said.
“They’re from Pepperidge Fucking Farm, and that’s not what you were about to say.”
“Can you think of anything I could possibly say that wouldn’t come off as either anti-Semitic or misogynistic?”
“Not offhand,” she said.
I couldn’t tell you when I met Ray Galindez, but I can picture him that first time, sitting at a desk in a station house, a sketch pad in one hand and a pencil in the other. Early in his career with the NYPD, he’d revealed a special talent for working with witnesses and translating their memories into detailed drawings. A lot of police artists use some version of IdentiKit, swapping eyes and lips and jawlines back and forth, until the witness is happy with the result, and there are times when that works pretty well. It’s better a lot of the time than the old-fashioned you-talk-and-I-draw method, because there aren’t all that many talented artists in blue uniforms, while just about anyone can learn how to rock an IdentiKit.
But nobody with an IdentiKit could come anywhere near Ray Galindez.
It wasn’t just that he was a very capable sketch artist. If you keep your eyes open you’ll see a lot of men and women with pencils and sketch books, in subway cars or coffee shops or public parks, sneaking peeks at someone across the way and trying to summon up a likeness. Sometimes I’d sneak a peek of my own, at the emerging sketch, and while there was something wrong with most of the drawings, on balance they were surprisingly good. Yes, you’d think, that’s her, all right. There’s something not quite right about the mouth, but it’s not bad.