The Forgotten Hours(6)
Last October she’d bumped into him at a gallery uptown, at an opening for a sculptor friend she’d read about in the paper. They were standing across the room from one another, Zev surrounded by lithe women with shiny hair, clad in black leather. Katie was the awkward third wheel with a couple who were bickering incessantly. The place was packed, shrill with cocktail conversation, yet when she caught his eye, a silence seemed to fall over her. His look—the flash of recognition. When his smile landed on her, it contained something different than it had when they’d been at school, something startled, intrigued. She’d stared right back at him. Later that night they had gone back to her apartment together, falling onto the mattress on the floor, grateful her roommate was out. Now as she looked at him, she thought of her father, of the fact that these two men would be meeting soon, and she had to admit that it made her anxious. If she was honest with herself, she wasn’t entirely sure her father would like him.
The girl with the yellow shirt came up to them. Her eyebrows were thin and severely curved, with a ring through each end. “Hey, can you help me back here?” she asked, gesturing. “I need some man power.”
Ducking the low mantel of the doorway, they descended four steps and entered a back room filled with equipment, canvases, boxes, and a few paint-splattered tables. Against one brick wall was a long counter with a toaster on it and a sink. A single bed stood at the back near the door. The three of them wrestled with unpacking a wooden crate that had been stapled shut. Later, the girl, whose name was Janet, made them all toast, and an older man dressed entirely in jean material—pants, shirt, and even jacket—brought everyone Carling lager from the corner store.
The man turned out to be the owner, and the two younger men who had been installing the partitions for the last few hours were his sons, already home from college for the summer. They all sat on the empty crates and talked as everyone devoured toast. Just outside the back door was a tiny patio surrounded by towering, broken fencing and cascading ivy, tinged brown from winter, and Katie stepped out as the others got back to work. She allowed herself one cigarette, sucking the smoke in deeply. It had become a habit that was proving hard to break—a way to calm her nerves. Although now, as the ember burned down toward the filter, her stomach clenched, and she pressed out the butt into a forlorn planter. I’m going to have to stop, she told herself. Soon.
Zev was hanging a large painting on the partition closest to the front of the room. He had taken off his sweater and was wearing an old T-shirt underneath, frayed at the neck. His eyelashes were long and dark, casting spiky shadows on his cheekbones. “Hey, d’you get your messages?” he asked.
“Messages?” Katie cut her eyes to his. Nothing in his posture suggested that he was tense, that he knew anything about the reporter who’d called.
“Yeah,” he said, pounding a nail into particleboard. “Your phone rang a lot when I was waiting for you, Friday. Forgot to mention it.”
It was one of those interminable, distorted pockets of time: a thousand thoughts crowding her brain. This was her opening, the opportunity she’d been waiting for to tell him about what had happened to her family. She imagined that he’d probably already pieced together some facts about why her father wasn’t around, why she rarely mentioned her parents, but she had never laid out the details. Words ricocheted through her mind like bits of gravel; they had a violent force of their own, sucking her further into herself. Together, those words didn’t add up to anything cogent. It was impossible to explain any of this to him when she herself still understood so little about what had happened that night—and afterward. It was time to say something, to try—and yet. She wasn’t ready; she couldn’t.
“Oh, that,” she said, slipping the fingernail of her thumb between her top and bottom teeth. “Nothing important.”
Zev raised his arms high to place a painting onto a hook. He regarded it silently, then tilted the painting to the left. “I’ve decided to rent some studio space in Bushwick, or maybe Bed-Stuy,” he said. “I was looking at places yesterday, and I think I’ve found something. Bare bones, but there’s a toilet, at least.”
“What about school? Teaching?” Katie asked. Zev taught three classes a semester at Vassar and had use of a large studio behind the maintenance garage. Years ago, that was where all the art students would hang out, smoking. That was back when Zev still smoked.
“Been there over fifteen years,” he said, grunting slightly as he adjusted the painting again. “Time for me to do more of my own work, be more independent. And I’m feeling the city vibe. You know?” He flashed his eyes at her—just a second—and she understood he was asking her if she wanted to see him more often.
“Yeah, cool,” she said, hating herself for her noncommittal tone, her childish vocabulary. She knew she should be happy, that this was a good thing, but she stalled. If Zev had a studio in Brooklyn, he’d be down in the city more often; surely this was good. This was nothing to be afraid of. As it was, they saw each other two or three times a month, and he stayed at her place for a few days at a stretch. When he wasn’t with her, she counted off the days until he would be back. Didn’t that mean she should want to see him more often?
“So, um. This straight now?” he asked.
“A little to the right. More.” The painting appeared to be a rendering of a very large baby, pink skinned and bawling. At first glance it seemed literal, almost graceless, until Katie saw that Zev had painted flesh-toned weapons rendered in astonishing detail over the entire surface of the child’s skin. Pistols, shotguns, brass knuckles, a cutlass, bullets, tanks. You couldn’t tell from far away, but up close the weapons were delicate, almost photographic. He’d done a fine cross-hatching with a black pen that looked like an etching layered on top of the paint. The contrast between the initial assumption about what she was seeing and the reality of what was actually depicted was jarring; that must be the point, she figured. “Now to the left a bit,” she said. “There, you got it.”