‘No. I can’t do anyone that good — every brushstroke is a signature. The stuff Harry had wasn’t in the same class.’
She lowered the paper. ‘Are you all right? Not nervous about the deal, are you?’ He kept his back to her, so she crossed to him. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
He tried to move away, but she caught his arm. ‘Tell me what it is.’
‘It’s nothing, sweetheart. Now, if you’re going to get your hair done, I should—’
‘I don’t need to. I can stay with you.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Not that you need any primping — I love you any way you look.’
She reached up and touched his cheek. ‘Thank you, but it gives me confidence to look good. You know how I hate standing up on platforms, let alone giving speeches. Though this will be the last one.’
‘Sonja, don’t talk that way. You’ll work again if you want to. Just give it time.’
‘I’ve given all the time I intend to give to my work in this lifetime,’ Sonja said, a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘That’s over now. Harry killed something deep inside me, and it just won’t come alive again.’
She was about to say more, but Arthur swore, almost frightening her. The tension he had been suppressing since he walked into the room now rushed to the surface in a torrent of words. ‘He’s dead, Sonja, for God’s sake — the man is dead. You make everything I am, everything we are, second best, second rate. Whenever you bring up that son-of-a-bitch — and you do, at every opportunity—’
‘I certainly don’t,’ Sonja said, needled. ‘I don’t know what more I could have done to put him out of my life. It was just that PI asking questions about him stirred up the memories again.’
‘Really? Well, I’m sick of hearing his name, and I’ve been patient, but I don’t know how much longer I can go on living with just the leftovers. I don’t want to hear about him any more. Whatever he did, whatever happened between you, is in the past, and if you want to keep it in the present, then I’m past, Sonja, because I can’t take it. I never wanted to get involved in this paintings scam, I did it for you. I—’
‘It’s going to make you very rich,’ Sonja snapped.
Arthur moved quickly across the room and grabbed her. ‘You don’t hear me, Sonja. Believe me, I know how much we’ll be worth. We’ve had to wait for it long enough, but without you, and I mean all of you, it won’t mean anything. All I want is some kind of assurance that he’s not going to dominate your life from his fucking grave. I don’t understand how you can keep on and on about him, keep loving such a cheap bastard.’
‘You think I still love him?’
‘It’s obvious. You can’t stop talking about the man! You go on and on about him to anyone who’ll listen, even to a woman digging around for stuff that could put us in jail. If that’s not love, then...’ He raised his hands in a helpless gesture.
Sonja put her arms around him. ‘I don’t love him, you big fool.’
He had to prise her away from him, wanting to look into her green-grey eyes see if she was lying. They were steady, and she didn’t flinch from his gaze.
‘I hated him, and I have hated with such intensity I have hardly been alive. He betrayed and destroyed everything I valued, he made everything I was meaningless. He threw all I had done for him back in my face, mangled all the love and care I gave him. It was as if he held me in his bare hands and kept wringing me like a rag, until—’
Arthur interrupted, his voice soft, ‘I’ve heard this before, Sonja. I’m not listening to you, but you should listen to me. I don’t want his leftovers, I need more — and if you can’t be free of him, then, for my own sanity, I have to be free of you.’
The phone rang and Arthur snatched it up, exchanged a couple of curt words with the caller, then said Sonja would be right down. ‘The hair salon — you’re late.’
He made as if to leave, but she held out her arms to him in entreaty. This time he did not, as he always did, cradle her to him and say it was all right.
‘I’ll be ready in a couple of hours,’ she said, letting her arms fall back by her sides. ‘I’ll never mention his name again.’
He wanted to smack her, shake her, throw her across the bed. He said, ‘Not enough — that’s not enough. I don’t give a shit if you talk about him, that’s not what I’ve been trying to get across to you and you know it. Whether it’s love or hate is immaterial. I’m just sick and tired of him being between us. When he was alive it was bad enough, but now he’s dead... I sometimes wish to Christ I’d pulled the trigger.’
She gave a strange, sad smile. ‘No, you didn’t, but I did.’
He felt as if he’d been punched. He swallowed hard. ‘Go and have your hair done.’
‘I love you,’ she said softly.
Arthur halted in his tracks. ‘Say that again.’
She was smiling again now, but a different smile of fun and pleasure. ‘I love you.’ She laughed.
‘No, what you said before that. After I said I wished I’d pulled the trigger. Repeat what you said.’
‘I said I wished I did.’
‘No, you didn’t. You said, “I did.”’
‘Artistic licence — I needed an exit line.’
‘No, your exit line was after you said you loved me. So-was it a joke?’
She closed her eyes. It was not that she was afraid to look at him, she was afraid she might lose him, that as soon as she had decided wholeheartedly to commit herself to him, he would be the one to back away. Suddenly she knew that that was more than she could bear.
‘Of course it was a joke,’ she said. ‘I mean, if you wanted to pull the trigger, do you think I didn’t?’
‘Open your eyes,’ he said, bending closer, and she did as he asked.
‘Give me the exit line, only this time look at me.’
‘I love you,’ she said softly.
‘You got me,’ he said, his voice gruff. He had waited a long time to hear her say it, and mean it.
Lorraine ate her plastic lunch on the nine thirty flight out of Newark, eager to get the interview with Nick Nathan over and done with, and hoping the journey wouldn’t be a waste of time. She landed in Albuquerque just after lunch and stepped out into the surprisingly pleasant dry air of a high altitude and to the limitless New Mexico sky: even in fall it was like walking on the bottom of an ocean of blue, which made even the mountains surrounding the desert city seem only knee-high. She carried her jacket over her arm, her briefcase in one hand and made her way through the terminal to the travel agent’s. She picked up a rental car, a Buick, then, armed with road maps, pulled out of town into the landscape of grey rock, desert pine and juniper to look for signs for the I-25 to Santa Fe.
As she joined the Interstate, Lorraine noticed on the map that its first thirty miles followed the course of the Rio Grande, and she could not resist turning off the highway for a few minutes to look at the great canyon, plunging down hundreds of feet to a truly breathtaking depth. Its sheer scale produced an overwhelming sense of the measureless, almost the eternal, and Lorraine understood now why so many artists and writers had chosen to make New Mexico their home. Still, she allowed herself only a couple of minutes’ delay — one middle-aged painter was all the scenery she had come to see.
Sonja came back from the beauty salon feeling glossy, gleaming and beautiful from top to toe, and she knew that part of the feeling of newness and freshness had nothing to do with the beauty treatments or the new hairdo: she felt that she and Arthur had turned the corner at last. It had been her fault, she knew, that it had taken so long, but she would make it up to him now.