The Red Hunter(11)
I swept up the mess from the gray slate floor and refilled the bowl with the stupidly expensive cat food I had to pick up from the organic pet supply store in the West Village. Tiger purred madly, then set to eating as though he hadn’t eaten in days though I’d filled his bowl that morning and had only been gone a few hours. He was lonely. I felt bad for him.
I had never met the artist that owned the apartment. He contacted me via the website where I list my services, checked my references, and then hired me without ever meeting me. He paid me via PayPal. It was possible we’d never meet, as had been the case with many of my previous employers. I preferred that. No connections. No personal contact.
But something about Tiger’s loneliness niggled at me. After sitting with him awhile on the couch, petting him, thinking about Paul, about John Didion, I got up, grabbed my laptop, and wrote Nate Shelby an email:
Tiger’s lonely. Maybe you should consider another cat.
He wrote back promptly.
[email protected].
I’ll think about it. Thanks.
Okay, great. The encounter led me to look up his website. It was spare and beautiful like his apartment, all neutrals, the only bright colors in the large-format oils, some of which I recognized from around the apartment. Big bold strokes of color, spheres, spirals, angry splashes, thick black jags that looked like tears in the canvas. His bio had no picture: Nate Shelby, a graduate of The Cooper Union, is a renowned artist who works primarily in oil on canvas. His work has appeared in galleries and museums around the world. He divides his time between New York and Paris.
In a world where people were promoting themselves from every possible platform, Nate Shelby didn’t seem to feel the need. I searched around online for some pictures of him and only found a couple. One when he was still at The Cooper Union. He stood in a room of other artists surrounding a nude woman who reclined on a chaise. He was thin and pale with a thick mop of black hair, his face a mask of concentration. There was another one of him, grainy, black and white, walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, hands in his pockets, head down. There were no shots of him at glamorous art parties in SoHo or Paris, no publicity images, no profiles in art magazines.
It wasn’t my habit to search out my clients. Usually, I could tell almost everything about someone by his home—what photos were displayed, and weren’t, objects collected, cluttered or tidy, what was in their medicine cabinet (that was a big one), the pantry, the state of the master closet, the home office. I got a sense after living in someone’s space for a while, an energy that settled on me. I knew the person even if we never met. I remembered the apartment and how it felt and smelled, like a relationship that ended amicably but forever.
The maid had been here. I could tell because the whole space smelled of astringent lemon, a tingling clean smell that was still unpleasant. Tiger settled on the windowsill, finding a lovely patch of light close to me. And I abandoned my laptop and sat in front of Nate Shelby’s gigantic Mac and opened the browser and entered the name that had been hovering on the edge of my consciousness all day, a tickle, a tune I couldn’t get out of my head.
three
It was the one thing he could always do, the thing that always made sense. He could build; he could fix. He could understand how a broken thing worked and make it work again. In school, he’d struggled. Words swam on the board, a muddle. He needed glasses, but no one figured it out until fourth grade, so he had trouble learning to read. Math? The only things less understandable than letters were numbers. But in the shop with his father, with the hum of the saw, and the sound of the hammer, and sandpaper on wood, the smell of varnish and sawdust—that’s where it all worked, where the pieces fit together. There was never any question, no abstraction. In the shop, if you had the right tools, you could fix anything. Not so in the world outside.
He wiped down the surface of the work area. His dad was long gone, but Joshua Beckham still followed the rules of the shop. A place for everything and everything in its place. Keep the work area uncluttered. Clean up at night before you go home.
He’d fixed Mr. Smyth’s vacuum. He wasn’t going to charge the old man because it was just that the roller was full of hair; that’s why it had stopped moving. It had only taken him a few minutes to clean it and there was nothing to it. His dad wouldn’t have charged for a thing like that, and neither would Josh. Mr. Smyth, he knew, didn’t have much money—otherwise he’d have just replaced the old vacuum like anyone else would have.
After that, Josh had just finished sanding down and refinishing an old table for Jennifer Warbler; she’d found it at a garage sale and asked if he could “work some magic.” He could.
The table came to him gouged and wobbly, scratches and dull places on the surface, a chip out of the leg. He loved stripping a thing down, sanding away the old, patching up the wounds, watching it come back to life with a brand-new coat of stain.
He wasn’t sure what he’d charge Jennifer. She had three boys who ran her ragged, and she was a good customer, had Joshua out at her place six or seven times a year at least, most recently to fix a hole the oldest boy Brendan put in the drywall—with his brother’s head. (Jennifer: Thank goodness he was wearing his skateboarding helmet!) The loose dowel in the banister, a closet door off its hinges, clogged plumbing, some electrical (though he mainly needed to call in Todd for that—you didn’t mess with wires if you didn’t know what you were doing). Jennifer was married to Wayne Warbler, who commuted into the city to work. You know Wayne is a smart man, but he is not handy. I love my hubby, but I’m not sure he would even know what to do if I handed him a hammer.