“You sure are painting fast,” his grandson said.
“Don’t you have any lessons this afternoon?”
“Am I bothering you?”
“Not really.”
He was working fast, the way Kushik used to, the way he used to himself. It had been the one thing he’d been uncertain about before starting, because he’d adopted a much slower, more natural pace for himself in the intervening years. It was the only way to do it right, though, and he was pleased to find that he could still do it. The picture appearing bit by bit before him looked like Kushik’s work, right down to the pissed-off-looking impasto on the fringes.
“You have any pictures of this lady to go by?”
“Not a one. Apart from the painting I wiped off of this canvas, I haven’t laid eyes on her or any image thereof in more than sixty years.”
“You have a better memory than I do.”
“It’s funny, I could go years without being able to picture her in my mind’s eye. Just a vague image of a brunette, medium height, willowy. I could picture a dress she used to wear, but the face was a blur. Then out of the blue I’d see her as though she were standing in front of me.”
Maybe it came from looking at his old painting of her, or maybe it was the act of imagining how Kushik would have painted her. In any case the woman he was reconstructing on the canvas was the woman he’d known, right down to the melancholy in her gray eyes. She didn’t always look that way, but that was the expression he remembered most vividly. He had always guessed it had to do with her kids, stuck incommunicado in Maine with her estranged and vengeful husband, but she’d never put it into words, not to him.
“So how come you stopped talking to her?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“Sorry. You want me to go?”
“No, stick around. Kushik was always holding forth while he painted, it helps with the process.”
“So how come?”
He took a long, deep breath. “I took the thing way too seriously. She was a married woman, on the run, decided she wanted to paint. She was good, too, and in those days it took a certain amount of gumption to want to do serious figurative painting. So we were both in Kushik’s circle, and he didn’t take on that many acolytes. It was just a friendly working relationship until one day she asked if I wanted to drive to Colorado, rent a cabin down by the Rio Grande. So we went, spent ten days painting and playing house and then we drove back.”
“Was that near where we went that one time, where the guy killed the guy who killed the other guy?”
“That’s it, these tourist cabins were just down the road from Creede. Little Bob Ford, who shot Jesse James, set up a saloon there, and a man named O’Kelley shot him dead.”
“So that’s why you took us there?”
“I liked the area. Good fishing, pretty little town.”
“And nostalgia for the lady?”
“I don’t think so. I developed my own relationship to the place. But it’s true that the first time I went was with her.”
“So what happened when you went back?”
“I didn’t behave very well, I suppose. She’d made it plain from the outset that it was just for fun and nothing serious, she was already married, and anyway, I was just a kid of twenty-six or -seven.”
“I can’t help thinking twenty-six or -seven wasn’t such a kid back then, especially after the war.”
“Yeah, I bristled at that, having fought a world war and traveled the world as widely as possible in that pre-jetliner era, but then I proved her point by storming off and acting like a petulant boy when she ended it.”
“So she left you for the teacher.”
“No, that came later. But that was the last straw with me and Kushik. I’d been wanting to go my own way for a while, so it was a good excuse.”
“How much longer before you’re done with it?”
“Damn near finished right now. The old man always used to say quit before you’re quite done, it’s better to underwork a picture than overwork it.” He got off the stool and stepped back. After thirty seconds he changed brushes. “Glad you brought that up. Seems to me this is as good a stopping point as any. And here’s the most important part.”
He added a large jaunty slash of a K to the lower-right-hand corner.
“And now to let it dry. Tomorrow I can start the aging process, two, three days after that it’ll be ready to go.”
He covered it with a canvas drop cloth and they left the studio.
In the kitchen he poured himself and the boy iced tea from the pitcher he kept in the fridge. “So are you still mad about her and Kushik?”
“I was wondering that myself. Until I needed that canvas, I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, and I guess I don’t feel much at all. Maybe it was just her unsuitability that had made her so attractive. If she’d been single and my own age and eager to marry me, I might have kept her at arm’s length the way I did any number of other girls.”
“Huh. Maybe it’s something I get from you, then.”
“Maybe so. I don’t approve, exactly, but I do understand your urge to transgress.”
They stepped out the back door and sat down on the brick kitchen steps and looked out onto the old flower garden. “Begonias are looking sickly, aren’t they?” he said.
The boy squinted. “Which ones are they?”
“Long leaves, little white flowers in a bunch there. Too goddamn hot this spring. Not even the end of May and it’s like this.”
“Speaking of the heat, you smell something?”
He took a deep sniff and nodded. “Now you mention it, I’ve been half-processing something in my olfactory lobe for a day or two. But it’s definitely there now.” He set down his iced tea and approached the garden. Behind the begonias and against the fence to the neighbor’s yard lay an enormous dead raccoon, several days gone.