She turned and leaned against a table edge, crossed her ankles, crossed her arms under her breasts and said, “So?”
Personal chemistries have not yet been isolated and analyzed by the physiologists. Here was a specimen in her twenty-five-year-old prime, in full bloom. Certainly the female of my species, beyond question. She had walked with a promising curl of power in the haunch. Her arms were crossed under a hammocked roundness of breast, and her mouth was of an understated sensuality in shape and dimension.
But we were saying no to each other without any words. In my out-sized, wind-weathered, semibattered, loose-jointed way I seem to got the right responses for my full and fair share of the fair ones, but I could not see any signs of impact, or experience any. Maybe Old Mother Nature sets up some kind of overriding counterirritant when the genetics are a bad match. I knew this could be a heady package for somebody, but not for the McGee. I had caught the smiling eye of the girl at the corner of Huron for a half-second, and it had been a resounding yes, both ways. A conditional yes. Yes, if it wasn’t too late for us by the time we met. Yes, but I’m sorry it can’t be.
I wondered about the No which Heidi Geis Trumbill and I were saying to each other. I know when you can hear that large No: when they are too wrapped up in exactly the right guy to even be aware you are alive, when they are one of the cool voyagers from the Isle of Lesbos, and when they are seriously thinking of killing you. I could not fit Heidi into any Pattern.
“Sometimes,” I said, “the banking types get some help from non-banking types.”
“Let me say I think they need it. Talk about impartial. Hah! It’s perfectly obvious John Andrus has let that sweet demure elfin little bitch sell him down the river. Any slight suggestion that she might not be a hundred and ten per cent perfection, and he gets furious.”
“Kind of a strange marriage, I guess.”
Suddenly she approved of me. “Do take off your coat, Mr. McGee. Care for a drink?”
As she went and fixed herself a beaker of dry sherry and some gin over ice far me, I wandered over and looked through a wide arched doorway into her studio. It had a lot of tall windows for good north light, and it was painted a good off-white. It had at least the look of a working artist’s studio-work tables, easels, bouquets of worn-out brushes in old paint pots, new work on easels and on the walls, deep painting racks, scabs of paint on the floor, stacks of paintings leaning against the walls.
She came up and handed me my drink and stood beside me looking into the studio. “Please don’t ask me to explain my work.”
She had a rare talent for irritating me. So I said, “I doubt if you could, Mrs. Trumbill.”
With a cold smile as she turned toward me, she said, “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Sorry, I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”
“My dear man, abstract expressionism has been around so long that it…”
“That it gets imitated too much. You’ve got some color sense. You go too far in setting up weird composition. But that doesn’t mean you are setting problems or trying to solve them. It’s glib stuff, Heidi. It hasn’t got any bones. It hasn’t got any symbol values, any underlying feeling of weight or inevitability. It’s just sort of shock-pretty, and you certainly get some satisfaction out of doing it, but just don’t start taking it or yourself too seriously.”
Fury drained the color out of her face. She went striding away, whirled so quickly she slopped some of her sherry onto the living-room rug. “Just who the hell are you? My work sells! I’ve been in damned good juried shows. I’ve had some fantastic reviews.”
“I’m just a guy who buys a painting once in a while.”
“Then what could you possibly know about it? You jackasses learn a couple of stock words and voila! you’re a critic yet.”
“There’s nothing wrong with decoration, Heidi.”
“You will call me Mrs. Trumbill if you don’t mind.”
“I mind, Heidi. Your stuff will melt right into the wall after a week. Nobody will see it. That’s no disgrace. It’s decorative, but it ain’t art.”
“Get out of here!”
“You can call me Trav, or Travis.”
There was a piece of paper on a table beside a lamp. I saw a pencil on the coffee table. I took the blank paper over and put it beside the pencil. “Just make me a sketch of that lamp and the window beyond it, girl, and I’ll go quietly.”
“Oh, you mean draw you a cow that looks like a cow?” she said with a poisonous and knowing smile.
“Go ahead. Funny, but everybody I can think of right off the top of the head could sure God draw a fat realistic cow if they ever happened to want to. Hans Hoffman, Kline, Marca-Relli, Guston, Solomon, Rivers, Picasso, Kandinsky Motherwell, Pollock. And you know it, baby. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You dabblers bug me. You want the applause without all the thousands of hours of labor learning how to draw, how to make brush strokes, learning all the thing’s that give painting some bite and bones even when you don’t use any part of it. Go ahead, draw the lamp. Quick sketch. Prove I’m a jackass.”
She trotted over, flounced down, took the pencil and made some quick lines, then stuck her tongue tip out of the corner of her mouth and drew a more careful line, then she got up and threw the pencil at the paper. It went bouncing under a chair.
“Shit!” she said. “So I fake it. Everybody does. And I get away with it.”
“Suddenly I think I like you a little better, Mrs. Trumbill.”
Her smile was wan and strained. “I’m underwhelmed, Mr. McGee. People don’t talk to me like that often.”
“Drenches out the glands, they say.”
She studied me. “I suppose it’s an approach, actually. You get nasty to a girl and it shocks her so she gets hung up. Nice try.”
I gave her my most amiable grin. “Miss Pussycat, I have the feeling if some jolly experimental giant crammed us both buck naked into a one-man sleeping bag, we’d apologize to each other, get back to back, and try to get a little sleep.”
“And that too is an absolutely transparent pass, damn you.”
“Try me. You turn on my lights not at all, Miss Heidi.”
“I damned well could if I should ever develop a taste for huge dull muscular men, but I’m afraid I put all that behind me when I reached sixteen. Can’t we please finish whatever it is you came for and break this off?”
“Pleasure. We’re checking out Gloria Doyle Geis very carefully.”
“It’s about time, wouldn’t you say?”
“I know you made some suggestions to Andrus.” She sat on the couch again.
“But he won’t really see what a cheap little adventurer she is. I think I’ve figured it all out. Of course there isn’t anything on her record. I think she had an accomplice. They worked out some kind of a story about something she was supposed to have done, and then the accomplice blackmailed all that money out of my poor sick confused father. She had him on drugs, you know. I think that could be proved in court. Now all she has to do is just sit tight and pretend she doesn’t know a thing. Believe me, that money is hidden in some safe place and when the fuss dies down, she and her unwashed friend will disappear with it.”
“Makes sense, I guess.”
“You know it does. My God, he denied his own children, his flesh and blood, by leaving that grubby little waitress a whole half of his money anyway. But oh no, that wasn’t enough for her. There’s no limit to the greed of that kind of person.”