They stayed a while longer, there, on the bench, while the park grew dim. For several days Jasper Gwyn had been pondering a particular idea and now he wondered if Rebecca would like to hear it.
“Of course,” she said.
Jasper Gwyn hesitated briefly, then he said what he had in mind.
“I’ll need some help, to get my new work going. And I thought that no one could help me better than you.”
“Meaning?”
Jasper Gwyn explained to her that there were a lot of practical things to arrange, and he couldn’t really imagine looking for clients, or choosing them, or something like that. Not to mention the price, and the ways of defining and collecting it. He said he absolutely needed someone to do all that for him.
“I know that the most logical solution would be Tom, but it’s hard now for me to talk to him about it, I don’t think he wants to understand. I need someone who believes in it, who knows it’s all real and makes sense.”
Rebecca listened, surprised.
“You want me to work for you?”
“Yes.”
“For this business of the portraits?”
“Yes. You’re the only person in the world who really knows what they are.”
Rebecca shook her head. That man certainly liked to complicate her life. Or resolve it, who knows.
“Just a minute,” she said. “A minute. Don’t be in such a hurry.”
She got up, left the book by Klarisa Rode to Jasper Gwyn, and headed toward a kiosk that sold ice cream, farther along the path. She got a cone with two scoops, which wasn’t very easy, because she couldn’t find her wallet. She returned to the bench and sat down again next to Jasper Gwyn. She held out the cone.
“Would you like a taste?” she asked.
Jasper Gwyn shook his head no, he didn’t, and from far away the candies of the woman in the rain scarf came back to him.
“First I have to explain something to you,” said Rebecca. “I left the house in order to explain it, and now I’ll explain it to you. If you want to continue to make portraits, it will be useful to you.”
She stopped a moment to lick the cone.
“In that studio everything is illogically easy, or at least it was for me. Seriously, you’re in there, and there’s nothing that after a moment does not become, in some sense, natural. It’s all easy. Except for the end. That’s the thing I wanted to tell you. If you want my opinion, the end is horrendous. I also asked myself why, and now I think I know.”
She was careful not to let the ice cream drip; every so often she glanced at it.
“It might seem stupid to you, but at the end I would have expected you to at least hug me.”
She said it like that, very simply.
“Maybe I would have liked to make love with you, there, in the darkness, but certainly I would have expected at least to end up in your arms, in some way, to touch you, touch you.”
Jasper Gwyn was about to say something, but she stopped him with a wave of her hand.
“Look, don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not in love with you, I don’t think—it’s something else, and it has to do just with that particular moment, that darkness and that moment. I don’t know if I can explain it, but all those days when you are basically your body and almost nothing else… all those days set up a kind of expectation that something physical should happen, at the end. Something that rewards you. A distance that’s filled in, I’d like to say. You fill it in by writing, but I? We? All the people who’ll have their portraits done? You’ll send them home as you sent me, at the same distance as there was the first day? Well, it’s not a good idea.”
She glanced at the ice cream.
“Maybe I’m wrong, but they’ll all feel the same thing I felt.”
She tidied up the dripping ice cream.
“Someday you’ll write a portrait for an old man, and it won’t make any difference, at the end that man will look for a way to touch you—against any logic or desire, he’ll feel the need to touch you. He’ll come over and run a hand through your hair, or shake your arm hard, even just that, but he’ll have a need to do it.”
She looked up at Jasper Gwyn.
“Well, let him do it. In some way you owe it to him.”
She had reached the crunchy part, the cone.
“It’s the best part,” she noted.
Jasper Gwyn let her finish, then asked if she would work for him. But in a tone in which he might have said that he was charmed by her.
Rebecca thought that this man loved her, only he didn’t know it, and would never know it.
“Of course I’ll work for you,” she said. “If you promise to keep your hands to yourself. I’m joking. Give me back the Rode, or do you want to keep it and read it?”
Jasper Gwyn seemed on the point of saying something, but then he simply gave her the book.
Three weeks later, in some journals carefully chosen by Rebecca, an advertisement appeared that, after many attempts and lengthy discussions, Jasper Gwyn had decided to reduce to three clear words.
Writer executes portraits.
As a reference it gave only a post-office box.
It won’t work, the lady in the rain scarf would have said.
But the world is strange and the advertisement worked.