“Good morning,” she says to Juan de la Cruz Saudade when she reaches his side. “Have you consulted our price list?”
Saudade stares at her with an amused look of surprise. For a moment they both remain that way, looking at each other, he looking slightly down and she looking slightly up due their differences in height. Saudade is wearing a black suit on top of a salmon Prada for Men shirt and has his hair slicked back along his perfect skull. Hannah Linus feels some sort of very soft tingle in her abdomen.
“Lovely,” says Saudade. Then he takes off the eyeglasses hung on a little chain and sticks one of the arms between his lips in a flirty pensive gesture. His lips are large and fleshy and flanked by two perfectly symmetrical lines that constitute Saudade's most sexually attractive facial element according to a significant majority of his past lovers. “I mean this, of course.” He points to the painting with the arm of his glasses. He smiles. “It's incomparable. Ahem, fascinating,” he says after a brief hesitation.
Hannah Linus looks at the painting. It's a Venus in front of a mirror from the Bellini school. Frankly a minor piece, even in a two-bit exhibition such as this one. Chosen as a filler and duly situated beside the door to give the impression that the walls are filled without attracting too much attention. The Venus is looking at herself in the mirror with a bored face, beside an open window that shows a rural landscape as dictated by the conventions of the period. Her pale, cellulitic body is naked except for the gauzy, unnaturally twisted sheet that covers her sexual parts.
“How can I explain it?” Saudade squints. “The chick is in her birthday suit and it's obvious she's a hottie.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Or must have been in her day. And yet, that's not the important thing. It's not like when you see a naked chick in a porn movie. I don't know if you get me. This is like something more…” He takes an ever so slight pause to give emphasis to the word, “artistic.”
Hannah Linus stares at Saudade. For a second it seems as if she is going to say something. Then her gaze shifts toward the extreme opposite end of the room, where Raquel and the security guard are watching her with quizzical expressions. Then she looks at Saudade again.
“Is this your gallery?” says Saudade. Looking at the painting again. With the same half smile. “That's great. I like art a lot. I could spend hours looking at pictures and all that.”
Hannah Linus seems confused. The man seems to be in no way terrified by her presence, nor by the tone of voice with which she questioned him. A tone that she has been perfecting over the years. He shows none of the terrified uncertainty that she usually inspires in people. The man gazes at the painting and when he looks at her he does so with some sort of superiority. Of amused self-confidence. With an expression so openly insulting that Hannah Linus can't help but feel intrigued. And then there's the man's face, and his body. The man is so tall and slender and sexually attractive that it's hard not to look at him. Even with his suit and his glasses and his impeccable veneer of civilization, the man provokes in her mind sharp images of brutality and violent sex and powerful genitals. Hannah Linus wipes a drop of sweat from her forehead. She looks at her assistant again and then looks at Saudade.
“Are you interested in buying this Venus?” she says.
Saudade looks at her as if he doesn't understand.
“I mean the painting,” she says.
Saudade frowns a bit. Hannah Linus can see the tip of his tongue playing with the tip of the arm of his glasses. Hannah Linus's mind fills with strange images.
“I don't know,” Saudade finally says. “These are good paintings, but in general I like the paintings that are in more out-of-the-way places better. In discreet places where no one can see them.”
Hannah Linus nods.
“I think I have what you want.”
Twenty minutes later, Hannah Linus is crawling on the floor of the gallery's storeroom, picking up articles of her clothes one by one. All the light in the storeroom comes from some energy-efficient fluorescent tubes that give the space a sad and vaguely dangerous look. Like in a movie set in a spaceship where a nonhuman intruder decimates the crew one by one. After searching the entire room, she finds what's left of her panties behind a radiator. She holds them up and stares at them with a vaguely melancholy face. The largest piece could still be identified as panties by someone with good investigative skills. Then she wrinkles her nose like someone who has just noticed an odor someplace it shouldn't be.
“You can't smoke in here,” she says to Saudade, who is lying contentedly on top of a pile of cardboard and bubble wrap. “Smoke destroys paintings. And you're going to set off the alarms.”
Saudade lets the ash from his cigarette fall into his cupped palm and takes another long drag with that powerfully insulting half smile that seems to be his default expression. The natural arrangement of his features. His posture as he lies on the cardboard pile gives Hannah Linus the strange sensation that his penis is watching her. Saudade's penis, as she sees it now, is like a curled-up animal resting after the sexual act while still keeping an eye on her. Hannah Linus often gets that same feeling from the penises of men she has just had sex with. She can't say it's a feeling she particularly likes. Saudade's penis isn't exactly the same color as the rest of his body. Saudade's skin is a toasted color reminiscent of dark bread and fishermen under the sun, while his penis is a sickly color that makes one think of skinless animals slithering out of their shell.
Hannah Linus begins to dress. Turning her back to Saudade. Her naked body provides the perfect complement to her dressed body. Not a gram of fat. Muscular without becoming masculine. With strong legs and a thin waist and breasts belligerently projected aloft. It's the essentially pointy nature of her breasts and their upward orientation that give them their ballistic air. An atavistic piece of weaponry.
“That was stupid,” she says, putting on the skirt of her business suit. “A very unfortunate episode. I'd appreciate you leaving through the fire exit and never coming back to this gallery. I don't want my employees losing respect for me. If you want to buy a painting, do it by telephone.” She stretches out her arms to close her bra hooks behind her back. Then she shrugs her shoulders. “Although frankly, perhaps you should spend your money on something else.”
His silence makes her turn her head toward the place where he's lying on his cardboard bed. There is something strange about his cardboard bed. Something not so much ridiculous or grotesque as genuinely disturbing. Something that makes her think of naked saints and martyrological images. Saudade's penis stretches idly and stands to look at her face-to-face. Hannah Linus halts in the middle of putting on her blouse. In some part of the storeroom the click of an automatic device is heard. Hannah Linus surprises herself by taking a couple of hesitant steps toward Saudade. His penis watches her, amused. She kneels down slowly. Above her head a fine rain falls from the fire alarm's sprinkler system.
WONDERFUL WORLD
By Stephen King
CHAPTER 17
Chuck Kimball opened the door to the kitchen, stuck his head out cautiously and finally went into the backyard. He closed the door behind him and went across the yard toward the shed, trying to act naturally.
Underneath his Red Sox cap he wore a double layer of asbestos. He had folded the layers of asbestos from the blinds and the false ceiling and now, as he walked through the yard trying to keep his nerves from betraying him, a part of the inner lining of his cap stuck out through the back. He was lucky that They didn't always see so well. But the asbestos couldn't protect him forever.