2.

“No room in the precinct. Going to the Tombs.”

Claire didn’t know if he was talking to her or his radio. She hadn’t a clue where that was, the Tombs, and she was afraid to ask. Her tomb? They were driving now through Chinatown.

“We’re putting men in the women’s cell,” the cop said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror. “You might like that.” But his smirk disappeared and he said, “They’re not too scary. You’ll be safe.”

It was her own painting, that’s what she’d tell them. Why shouldn’t she have taken it back? All she would have to say is that it belonged to her, it was simply a misunderstanding.

Central Booking, stuffy and hot. She kept her eyes on her painting dangling from the cop’s hand. He didn’t even look at it. And if he did, he wouldn’t see its beauty.

They asked if she had any drugs on her and seemed not to believe her when she said no. They spread her bags and their contents across a desk. Her painting was being taken somewhere.

“What are you going to do with it?” Claire tried to sweeten her voice, but it came out shrill and childish.

“We’re calling Inspector Picasso,” the cop said. “He’s on it, don’t worry.”

She was taken down a cement hall and three flights of stairs. A frightening version of her basement and storage unit. An officer was walking behind, one hand on her shoulder, another on her back. She couldn’t see the face of the man who touched her, but she could feel the heat of his hand through her blouse. They’d taken her coat. She hoped it was draped over her canvas.

“Please. What about my painting?” she asked again.

“Ma’am. He’s lost his beret, he’ll be here soon.” On her back, she felt his hand shiver as he laughed at his own joke.

In the cell, gym mats were scattered on the floor, covered in half-eaten sandwiches. She saw the sandwiches before she saw the faces. Nine other people. But she didn’t register much more than a number, her mind jittery, bouncing to the next thing before landing completely on the first. There was an old pair of pants in the corner. Beside them, liquid that might have been urine or juice. The overwhelming smell of bleach made everything indistinguishable. There was one bed with a metal frame and a blue-and-white-striped mattress not an inch thicker than the gym mats.

A bench ran along the three walls. Claire sat down immediately, but the bench was so skinny she barely fit. She had to sit very straight, hands folded in her lap, legs closed, a well-to-do lady in a jail cell. She touched her scraped leg, her ripped stockings.

The nine faces hardly glanced at her. There was a pale, skeletal woman, wearing surprisingly few clothes for winter, sitting cross-legged on a mat, staring at her hands like something was wrong with them. A young boy rested his head on a girl’s lap. The boy was white and his girlfriend was black. This would have surprised Claire, and she would have hidden that surprise, had it been any other day. The boy’s eyes bulged and he melted as she stroked his hair. There was a love between them, neither over sixteen years old. A middle-aged woman cried softly in the corner. An old man, Russian maybe, slept on the bench. And four young men—three white and one black, all with dirty, disappointed faces—conversed quietly in the center of the cell. One had a broken nose, dried blood caked to the lower half of his face.

Claire desperately wanted to be invisible. If she didn’t hear them or see them, perhaps they wouldn’t see her. She breathed shallow through her mouth to block the stench. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something scurry past, but when she looked, there was nothing. Her arms itched, and she imagined spiders and rats under the bench and in the walls. She felt she was going mad, and for a moment—oh she was so tired—for a moment she thought that was why she’d been locked away.

A sign on the wall read, water available upon request. Below that, another: sanitary napkins available upon request. Claire went to the bars and reached her arm through. She couldn’t be sure how long she stood there like that, waiting to be noticed. Her arm began to ache. The light was constant, the cruel desperation of ceaselessly buzzing fluorescent tubes.

Her favorite role that Avery had given her was for one of his silent films. She was a scantily clad bar wench who’d lost her lover in an unnamed war and who grieved by bombing City Hall. She ended up in jail, fell in love with another woman who had also lost everything to war, and together they broke free into a night without consequences.

This cell was not made of cardboard.

An officer finally approached.

“The sign said to ask for water,” she said.

“No cups,” he said, about to walk away. She pouted her lips, and could tell her lipstick had worn off long ago. After studying her face a moment, he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

The officer never returned with water. When another guard walked by she reached out again and said, “I didn’t get to make a phone call.”

He laughed. She didn’t know what he found funny. “Sure, you can have a phone call. If you ask nice.”

“I can be nice,” she said. “But where’s the fun in that?”

He grinned then coughed to hide it. He called down the hall to someone. They yelled back and he said, “You’ll have to wait, sweetheart.”

When it was her turn, the same man—or was it the first?—unlocked the cell and she slid out, but it didn’t feel like she was out. Her cellmates stared after her.

“The rich lady wants to make a phone call,” the officer said to another.

Was it the Macy’s bag that had given them the impression she was wealthy? She didn’t bother correcting them. She dialed Mary’s number. The phone rang with an accusatory tone. It rang and rang. Where was Mary when she needed her? If only she could call Tomasz. It was entirely his fault this had happened. He hadn’t destroyed the painting. He had lied to her. She would call him and tell him he had to clean up his mess with his stupid, dirty rag.

“Hello?” Mary said.

Claire was silent in the warmth of her friend’s sudden voice. Then she hung up. She couldn’t explain it all to Mary now, not like this.

“Husband not home, huh?” said one of the officers, softer than before.

“No,” she said. “No one’s home.” She asked for a glass of water and they let her use her hands at a sink. She splashed her face and stared at her fun-house reflection in the chipped stainless-steel mirror.

Back in the cell. The fluorescent light that never ceased. The payphone ringing. She sat on the bench and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, three more people had been put in the cell and had found a place on the floor or the bench. The one who had been crying earlier was missing. She’d been crying but never made a sound. How much time had passed?

She watched the old man on the floor, sleeping with his head tilted back on the bench, his chin in the air. She tried to breathe steadily like he was, matching his chest’s rise and fall. But he stirred as if he felt her gaze and met her eyes. “I was only drinking a beer on the street,” he said.

Claire said, “You should hold it in a paper bag.”

Two of the boys shuffled oddly in the middle of the room. Were they dancing? No one could possibly dance in here. And then one boy was on the shoulders of the other, stretching his arms above his head, holding a cigarette to the light fixture, trying to catch a spark.

“Unscrew the covering,” Claire offered.

“We know, lady,” said the boy on the bottom. He was older than the others and had been talking excitedly earlier, the other boys listening intently. Claire looked away. Why she was concerning herself with these people, she didn’t know.

The smaller one on top said to her, still straining up, “They took our lighters.”

The plastic covering fell to the ground. Someone yelled, “Watch out,” after it had already smashed into several large pieces.

Of course it wouldn’t light, they were only killing time. The boy on the ground lowered the other down safely.

Then he looked at Claire, a little sheepishly, and walked over to where she sat. A cigarette was trapped in his mouth, sticking to his dry lips as he talked. “Police did that to him,” he said, pointing to the boy with the bloody nose. Claire nodded and tried to look sympathetic. “Sorry for being testy. I need a drag and a cheeseburger.” He handed the cigarette to Claire, who wished he hadn’t mentioned a cheeseburger. “You gotta pretend,” he said.

Claire took it and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t bring it to her mouth.

In the center of the room, the other boys were growing excited and their voices carried.

“I heard fifty thousand,” the bloody one said.

“No way. A hundred thousand. It’s possible.”

“The radio said seven,” said the third.

“They’re liars.”

“They get the numbers wrong on purpose. And we can’t do anything about it.”

“Fucking yuppies is what they are.”

From beside Claire, the older boy flicked another cigarette at them. “Hey, watch your mouth.” He turned back to Claire. “Were you there? At the protest?”

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded solemnly, studying the bars. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

His eyes were tired and absent, two-dimensional like cigarette burns. She liked that he assumed she’d been thrown in here with the other protesters, something wild. He seemed to be their leader, confident but not arrogant, in his early or mid-twenties. His hair was shaggy and unwashed, and he wore a plaid shirt with a frayed collar and wide-legged slacks. Not a hippie, or a beatnik, nor upright. Claire liked that he didn’t appear to belong to any group. Obviously, he hadn’t had a mother picking out his clothes for some time. Even in here he smelled nice.

She nodded toward the other boys. “They listen to you.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I quit drugs a while back, but once you realize that sometimes people actually listen, and you have this power to be heard and all—I can’t get enough of it. So, if I’m going to be addicted to something?” He shrugged. “You hear me?”

Claire raised the unlit cigarette to her lips and pretended to inhale. “I hear you.” She handed it back to him. “How long have you been in here?”

He looked at his watch very seriously. “Five hours, twenty-three minutes, seventeen seconds.” He grinned. He had nice teeth.

“How long have I been in here?” she asked quietly.

A faint V of veins rose from his forehead. He stopped grinning, stood up and announced, “It’s time for sleep.” His boys mumbled consent. The others in the cell seemed to agree, too.

But there weren’t enough mats for everyone. The boys rested their heads on each other’s shoulders or legs, and immediately started horsing around again.

“Don’t act stupid,” their leader said. “We have to speak up for ourselves and protest this bullshit, excuse my language. Are you going make sense at the arraignment if you don’t sleep? Are you going to convince anyone you don’t belong here?” No one answered. It was like he’d flicked out the lights, and everyone settled in, making a bed of the cement floor. He motioned for Claire to take the one bed. Stepping over the legs of children, she shook her head. “I don’t need it.”

He smiled so warmly she thought she could kiss him. He sat down and patted the ground for Claire to sit. They leaned their backs against the metal frame of the bed and their heads on the edge of the thin mattress. She watched the boys resting on top of one another. An unsaid trust. Somewhere, someone was screaming. But when she shut her eyes, it was a whisper.

The cement dawn smashed Claire in the side of the head. Dug its nails into her back and kicked her hips in. She was too old to sleep on the ground.

The leader was up, standing over her as if he’d been watching her sleep, waiting for her eyes to open. He reached his hand down. She took it, he pulled her up. She was taller than him.

Her throat was so dry no sound came when she opened her mouth. Her voice pulled out of her like knotted rope. “I still don’t know your name.”

He grinned. “Jill,” he said. “What’s yours?”

What an odd name; she felt the urge to tease him. She thought of asking how old he was, but she didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want to know anything more. She wanted to go home. She wanted to fall on her bed with all her clothes on despite their filth, kick off her shoes and not care where they landed. Leave the door open, let anyone see her sprawled across her big mattress, her down quilt. But who would come to find her?

Later they brought bologna sandwiches. Breakfast. One boy threw a piece of bread at the wall and it didn’t bend or crumble; it made a hard sound like a pebble.

The strung-out boy threw up in the corner and the teenage girl called out for help. The guards said they’d call someone, but no one came. An hour later? Was it more? The boy put his head on her lap and she moved her fingers through his hair and whispered to him. Finally a man in a different uniform entered. They had to wake him; he’d fallen asleep near his mess.

“Let me stay with him,” the girl moaned after them. No one answered.

At some early hour, an officer came and called Claire’s name. She was first, though she’d been there the shortest time. She was moved to a different cell, then there was paperwork. Carbon copies of everything.

This is my street and this is my door. She clutched the painting at her side as she dug through her bag for her keys and came up empty. Her keys were lying in the middle of Fifth Avenue, crushed by feet and wheels. Maybe her keys were in the gutter. Maybe they’d reached the Hudson. And no one was home, waiting. No one was ever expecting her. Perhaps that was why she’d left her address and number for Jill and his boys. She’d asked the lawyer to give it to them, ignoring his raised eyebrows.

The public defender still had acne on his face, but he’d held her painting like an apostle. He’d told her not to say anything, that she could trust him. Samantha hadn’t bothered to show and it was easy for the young lawyer to prove it was a property dispute to be dealt with in the divorce proceedings, that the theft charges shouldn’t stand. “As you can see plainly,” he’d said, pointing at each falling face in the painting, “it’s her likeness. There’s no question here.” The painting was restored to her. She was let off without so much as a reprimand. But, somehow, Claire felt she’d failed.

Claire would have to find a payphone and call Tomasz after all, or a locksmith. She leaned her painting against the railing and sat down. She hugged her legs and rested her chin on her knees, making herself small. In the cold, on her stoop, her whole body was finished. It was used, unfed, every morsel of skin and muscles exhausted.

During the three-minute arraignment, Claire had wanted to jump up, to cover what felt like a great exposure, something very private revealed to all these public people. The judge had leaned forward, sleep still in his eyes, and looked at the painting. The officer had looked at the painting. The court bailiff had stopped shuffling papers to look at the painting. The lawyer, he’d looked and looked at the painting. Everyone stared at her torn body falling through the air—but no one said anything to indicate that this was strange. That it was bad. That it was a bad painting, an evil painting, that it should be found guilty.