She left Emma to sleep at her grandmother’s, and asked Robert if he would go out to the movies with some friends because she absolutely had to stay home alone that night. She had a really difficult job to do and she would like to do it with no one wandering around the house. She said it in a nice way, and he, as noted, had a sweet nature. He asked only what time he could come back.
“Not before one?” Rebecca tried.
“Let’s see,” he said. He had had in mind an evening with half an hour of television and early to bed.
Then, before going out, he kissed her and asked only: “I shouldn’t worry, right?”
“Absolutely not,” said Rebecca, although she wasn’t entirely sure.
Alone, she sat at the table and began to read.
Predictably, Doc wasn’t wrong. Three Times at Dawn was in three parts, and the first was very similar to one of Jasper Gwyn’s portraits. It even turned out to be true that it was a little longer, but, when she began to check, Rebecca determined that all the important things were there. Without any doubt the two texts were close relatives.
Nor was Doc wrong in saying that the book was a beautiful book. The other two parts flowed so smoothly that Rebecca ended up reading them, forgetting for long stretches the real reason that she was doing it. The book consisted mainly of dialogues, and there were two principal characters, the same ones in each part, but there was something paradoxical and surprising about it. At the end she regretted that Akash Narayan had wasted all that time as a music teacher, when he could write like this. Provided she believed that he truly existed, obviously.
Rebecca got up to make coffee. She looked at the time, and saw that she still had a good bit of the evening. She got out Jasper Gwyn’s portraits and put them on the table.
All right, she said to herself. To summarize: Rode doesn’t exist, it’s Jasper Gwyn who writes her books. Same goes for Akash Narayan. And so far we’ve got it, she thought. Why he put my portrait in Klarisa Rode’s book I can imagine: because he loved me (she smiled at this thought). Now let’s see if we can discover why the hell he put the other portrait in Three Times at Dawn. And that portrait in particular. Who is this shit who deserved a gift as nice as mine? she wondered. She was beginning to enjoy herself.
The problem was that there was nothing in the portraits entrusted to her by Jasper Gwyn that could be traced back with certainty to one of the clients who had paid to have them done. Not a name, not a date, nothing. Besides, the simple but singular technique with which they had been executed made it difficult to recognize the person who had inspired them, unless you had a profound familiarity with him. In other words, it looked like an impossible job.
Rebecca began to proceed by elimination. She had read a page of the portrait of the girl, and she was gratified to be able to say that the one in Three Times at Dawn wasn’t hers. The portrait of Tom she thought she had recognized, and if she had doubts Mallory had removed them: so that, too, could be eliminated (a pity, she thought, it was the only case that would not trouble her). So nine remained.
She took a piece of paper and listed them in a column.
Mr. Trawley
The forty-year-old with the mania about India (Aha, she thought.)
The former hostess
The boy who painted
The two who had just gotten married
The doctor
The woman with her four Verlaine poems
The queen’s tailor
End
She set aside the folders with her portrait, Tom’s, and the girl’s. Then she opened the others and arranged them on the table.
And now let’s see if I can get somewhere.
She tried to come up with hypotheses, and several times she moved the open folders on the table, trying to match them with the people on the list. It was head-splitting, and for that reason it was some time before Rebecca noticed a detail that she should have noticed long ago, and which left her bewildered. The characters were nine but the portraits ten.
She checked three times, but there was no doubt.
Jasper Gwyn had sent her one extra portrait.
Impossible, she thought. She had made the arrangements, one by one, for those portraits, she had followed them from the beginning to the end, and it was unthinkable that for all the time they had worked together Jasper Gwyn had managed to make one that she knew nothing about.
That portrait shouldn’t have existed.
She counted again.
No, there really were ten.
Where did this tenth come from? And who the hell was it?
She understood suddenly, with the blazing speed with which we understand, long afterward, things that have been in front of us forever, had we only known how to look.
She picked up the portrait that was in Three Times at Dawn and began to re-read it.
How could I not have thought of this before?, she asked herself.
The hotel lobby, shit.
She continued to read, avidly, as if swallowed by the words.
Hell, it’s him, exactly, she thought.
Then she looked up and realized that all the portraits made by Jasper Gwyn would remain hidden, as he had wished, but that two would be hidden in a singular fashion, wandering through the world sewn secretly into the pages of two books. One she knew well, and it was hers. The other she had just recognized, and it was the portrait that any painter sooner or later attempts—a self-portrait. From a distance, it seemed to her, they looked at each other, a handbreadth above the others. Now yes, she thought—now it’s the way I never stopped imagining it.
She got up and looked for something to do. Something simple. She began to straighten up the books that were lying around, all over the house. She merely placed them on top of one another, but in small piles, from the biggest to the smallest. Meanwhile she thought of the delayed sweetness of Jasper Gwyn, turning it over in her mind, in the pleasure of observing it from every side. She did it in the light of a strange happiness that she had never felt before, yet which she seemed to have carried with her for years, waiting. It seemed impossible that, in all that time, she could have done anything except guard it and hide it. What we are capable of, she thought. Growing up, loving, having children, growing old—and all this while we are elsewhere, in the long time of an answer that doesn’t arrive, or of a gesture that doesn’t end. How many paths, and at what a different pace we retrace them, in what seems a single journey.
When Robert came home, passably drunk, she was still awake, but sitting on the sofa. Scattered on the table were all those folders.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes, I think so.”