This silenced me. A film of tears trembled in her eyes. Then the phone rang, and she stepped away from me to answer it.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Although I’d left him without regret the night before, I found myself hoping that it was Angus, calling from out of town or, better still, from some motel down the street. If he’d come to the door right then, I would’ve run out to the van within ten seconds. But it wasn’t him on the phone; it was Harold Wallace.
“You told me to call if I thought of anything else,” he said. “Well, I just thought of something else.”
Twelve
I followed Harold Wallace into a back room. His blue eyes were crisscrossed violently with blood, but his hair was neatly gathered in a ponytail, he was again wearing expensive, loosefitting clothes, and overall he seemed more alert than the last time. On the phone he’d been annoyingly mysterious, refusing to explain what he’d remembered until I arrived on his doorstep, and this morning he’d offered me coffee, tea, and even a plate of bizcochitos before I suggested, politely, that we just get down to business.
“Well, here we are. My office. The nerve center of the entire operation,” he said. If this was true, then the operation was in a lot of trouble. The small bedroom — underneath a stack of books and loose papers, barely visible, was a single bed — had been buried beneath years’ worth of bureaucratic detritus. Several filing cabinets stood half-open, their drawers stuffed beyond capacity with manila folders. Framed paintings and prints were leaning against every available surface.
“It’s a system I devised myself,” he said. “I know it looks strange, but it works for me.”
“How long have you been retired?”
“Oh, I’m not really retired. I still sell work from home. Yes, I’ve still got the eye, if you know what I mean.” He eyed my chest. I caught his bloodshot gaze and shook my head, and he shrugged and turned away, his smile hinting that it was mostly done out of habit anyway.
“So you remembered something,” I said.
“After you left, I got to thinking about what you said about the child, and I remembered a girl who got pregnant and kind of disappeared. She was a wild one, that girl. Anyway, a few years later, she sent me a photograph of herself. A look-whatyou’re-missing-out-on sort of thing, if you—”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“So I just have to go through these files and look for it. Maybe you’d like to sit down? This could take a while.”
I cleared a spot for myself on the bed and sat down to watch as he withdrew files, examined them, muttered to himself, then moved on to the next handful. Of course he could have done this before I came over, or left me alone to wade through the files myself. But he either meant for me to witness all his hard work or simply wanted company; watching him rifle through stacks of dog-eared manila folders, every once in a while glancing at me over his shoulder, I suspected it was the latter. Humming as he worked, Harold seemed perfectly happy to devote the entire morning to the search.
Actually, I felt more or less the same way. The night before, when I’d gotten off the phone, my mother was in her bedroom with the door closed, and I slunk off to my room feeling guilty and agitated. If she was going to run around with a married man whose wife was mentally ill, then she had to expect people to comment on it from time to time. That’s what I told myself, but still I’d stayed awake for hours, thinking that I’d made my mother cry.
I thought about my father too, wondering if Harold could possibly be right about him knowing Eva Kent. Maybe he was driving back from the labs in Los Alamos one day, stopped for lunch, and got lost — people always do in Santa Fe. Say he went into the Gallery Gecko to ask directions, and there she was, sitting beneath one of her paintings and luring potential buyers with her brittle talk and strange, striking looks. She was the kind of woman who talked people into things, and my stammering scientist father was an easy mark who found himself glued to the tile floor in the small gallery’s close, hot air. Eva told him her name and demanded to know his. “Arthur?” she said, smiling ferociously. “So do people call you Art?” At this point, my scenario ground to a halt. It was impossible to imagine my father falling into step with Eva, in whatever form it might’ve happened. Then again, I never would have imagined my mother with David, either, and this made anything seem possible. All parents, I thought, are mysteries to their children.
“How’s it going over there?” I asked Harold.
He was sunk in thought over an open file, its manila wings vibrating in his trembling hands. “Here,” he said, and handed it to me.
Inside, there was a photograph of Eva Kent standing on a beach somewhere, smiling, in a swimsuit and a sarong. The date on the white border read 1982. There was no child with her. Her body was heading toward middle age, spreading and sagging slightly. Her hair had been cut and layered, and its dark strands, waving in the breeze, were sticking up above her head like antennae. There was a kind of wild excess to her smile, as if she were uncomfortable, or drunk, or mentally unbalanced. Her arms and legs looked badly sunburned.
Also in the file were several pieces of paper. One was a yellowed strip of newsprint, a local paper’s review of a group show, with a ballpoint star next to: “One artist of particular promise is Eva Kent, a fiery oil painter with a sure sense of composition and style. Her violent technique contrasts meaningfully with her cool-eyed appraisal of the relations between male and female.” Beneath this was a letter from a gallery in New York, written to Harold, expressing interest in Eva’s work, requesting slides and dangling the prospect of a solo exhibition. I flushed with satisfaction: I wasn’t alone in feeling that jolt of electricity when confronted with her work.
The last item was a letter written on a sheet torn from a notebook, the writing slanted and blocky, almost childlike:
Dear Harold,
Here I am in California. I am feeling a hundred times better. I know you will take care of things.
XOXOXOXOXO
Eva
“What kind of things did you take care of?” I said.
“Oh, Jesus, who knows what that crazy lady was talking about.” Harold took the folder back, shut it, and sat down next to me on the narrow bed, puffing a little. “I’ve been thinking back to those days,” he said. “Eva Kent. The memories come flooding back when you look at this stuff. She was one of the better girl painters, all right. And you know, it was a great time for men when women decided they needed sex if they really wanted to be free.”
“I’m not sure that’s exactly what they decided.”
“It was definitely what some people thought, believe you me,” he said, and smiled. “We’d go up to Madrid and take over some run-down houses up there and stay all night. Eva’d be right there in the mix, always with a different man. She was aggressive, liked to do the choosing and the talking, and it worked well for her, especially with shy, quiet types. You said your dad was a straight arrow, right? Well, maybe that’s how he got the paintings. What do you think?”
I chose not to answer, thinking of my father — who was nothing if not the quiet, shy type — partying with painters in an abandoned mining town on the Turquoise Trail. This made me smile. Harold smiled too, though I didn’t know at what.
“The paintings my father got are really very good,” I said. “So what was the rest of her work like?”
“Which ones are those? Oh, yes, the desert ones. Well, I’m not entirely sure what happened to the other ones.”