Don't I Know You? Page 12

  It was time to be truer to herself, she’d decided.

  Under the cloth Rose inhaled the smell of the eggs and a lingering scent of bread. She began to relax, feeling the hard ground under her hips and shoulders. Agnes was making chicken-scratching sounds on the canvas with her pencil. Occasionally she would carve away at the angle of the tip with a penknife. Jimi noodled around on the guitar, making up a song about their rooster, Fidel.

  To be inside art, not outside thinking about it. Rose had forgotten how it felt. Journalism did not work like that.

  As Jimi played, unexpected images came into Rose’s mind, like animals at dusk appearing at a water hole. An image of Eric wading into the lake at the cottage, hugging himself and shivering. The look on his face coming down the hospital corridor the night Ryan had walked through a glass door and cut himself badly. She couldn’t reach him on the phone, and when he showed up hours later, he wouldn’t say where he had been. That was the point at which she knew, but refused to believe it.

  Then up rose another image of someone she worked with, a man with long sideburns and sleeves rolled tightly above his elbows as he pattered away on his keyboard. Rolf. This bland colleague sat in Rose’s line of vision for most of the working day. Part of her landscape.

  Sometimes her job was not to see.

  “My cherie amour,” Jimi was singing, “lovely as a summer day…” This brought a twitch of a smile to the corners of Agnes’s mouth. Her eyes kept flicking rapidly from horizon to canvas like a hummingbird that sips at a feeder, retreats, then darts back.

  “Oh, it’s wrong now,” she said, stepping back and letting her painting arm drop. “You distracted me, James.”

  Hendrix put down his guitar, went over to Agnes, and wrapped his arms around her as he studied the canvas. Rose lifted the cloth off her face to observe them.

  “It’s fine, Ag. Just thin it out.”

  “It will show.” She pouted like a girl.

  “It won’t. Keep going—this part is fine.” He pointed to one corner of the canvas, a curdled white like cirrus clouds.

  “Yes, that part is good.”

  “Go on.”

  “Play something different,” Agnes instructed, already twirling her paintbrush in a rosette of paint on the metal cookie sheet she used as a palette.

  “You start. I have to take a piss.” Jimi ambled over to the other side of the car, out of sight.

  “Paintings are jealous,” Agnes said to Rose. “The moment I feel the tiniest bit of satisfaction with one, the painting immediately senses it and misbehaves.”

  “Is it like a sense of smell, that you lose the freshness of your vision after a while?”

  “Yes. The first strokes are crucial. They come directly from the eye, not the brain.”

  Jimi came back over, jingling the car keys. “Let me show you something while she works,” he said. “Cherie, we’re going to the hoodoos.” Agnes didn’t turn her head.

  They drove back down the riverbed to a point where it forked, and followed another branch. The banks deepened until they were inside a narrow, shallow canyon. I really ought be asking him questions, Rose thought. After all, this was prime time—alone in a canyon with the world’s most legendary guitarist. Who had not died of an overdose after all. But she hated to break their companionable silence and the road required all of Jimi’s attention. Rose looked at his hands on the wheel, studying the four or five rings he wore. One was a Victorian cameo, a woman’s ivory face in profile. Another was a fang-shaped object, a bone or a bit of tusk.

  “It looks like ivory,” said Jimi, who had caught her glance, “but it’s made from a hoof. Agnes had an old horse she didn’t want to part with. When he died, she carved his hooves into birds and spoons, and this ring.”

  “I didn’t know she made other things.”

  “She likes to sew my shirts too.”

  With a familiar feeling of power and illicitness, Rose began to turn the conversation in the direction she needed it to go.

  “You two seem to get along very well.”

  “Yes, now. But not at first. She’d been living alone for a long time when I showed up.”

  All the windows were open and the cool air on Rose’s arm felt good. She got her notebook out of her bag, and saw the unopened letter from Eric. But maybe it wasn’t the invitation after all. Maybe it was a note, a drunken midnight note saying “Wedding off—please call!”

  “Can I ask how you came to be together?” she asked Jimi.

  He said nothing as he pulled off the road and stopped. Huddled before them was a forest of round, red dirt columns, a few twenty feet high, sculpted by the wind. Some resembled whirling Sufi dancers, cylindrical shapes that tapered at the bottom and fanned out ecstatically in the middle, then narrowed again. Others looked off-center, like half-thrown pots on a potter’s wheel, mouths wobbling out of plumb.

  “These are the hoodoos. It’s supposed to be sacred ground—the Hopi have ceremonies here.”

  “I can see why.” One of the columns was tall enough to cast a little shade and they walked toward it. Rose took a different tack.

  “So how did you end up here, Jimi?”

  “I came the long way round. When I ‘died,’” he said, “I was flown to Zambia, where at least I wouldn’t look out of place. For the next few years I lived in the countryside there and raised goats. I had a wife.”

  “Did you play music?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you run away?”

  Jimi ran a hand down one of the sand columns and was quiet for a time. “Just, things had gotten out of hand.”

  “You were so young. Only twenty-seven.”

  “All I wanted to do was play guitar, but the more famous I became, the more other things got in the way.”

  “Like drugs.”

  “Yes. In the end only heroin got me back inside the music.”

  “So you faked your death?”

  “In a way. I mean, I did almost die. But I made a deal with the doctor who revived me, who had treated me before. She came with me to Zambia to get me through quitting.”

  “Really? She never told anyone, or wrote a book?”

  “No, no,” Jimi said impatiently. “She cared for me. She kind of loved me.”

  “But why leave Zambia?”

  “My wife was very traditional. She wanted a lot of babies and a man with a big herd of cattle. A guitar player who didn’t play anymore wasn’t her idea of a husband.”

  They stood under one of the hoodoos and she touched the silky, wind-abraded bark. A tree of stone.

  “So I came here and disguised myself at first. It worked. America is full of fugitives anyway. I found a little house to rent outside Taos.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. Then I bought a guitar and began to play again.”

  Rose waited patiently, saying nothing.

  “One day in town, I went into a gallery and saw two of Agnes’s paintings. They struck me, like an old blues song that doesn’t sound like much at first, but the lines stick in your head. A week later I went back to see them again and Agnes was in the gallery, hanging something new. We spoke. Later that day I went back to her house.”

  “So the two of you are…?” Jimi laughed.

  “We’re together. Let’s leave it at that.” He reached in his pocket for the keys.

  Rose felt the door of their conversation close. They got in the car, and Jimi drove at jarring speeds back to their earlier spot. Agnes, her hat jammed low on her brow, stood in the same place, looking at the same horizon line. The canvas now had an urgent radiance. It was heading toward finished. Her face looked smooth and lit-up too.

  Jimi walked over and she turned to him with delight, as if noticing a new blossom in her garden.

  “Cherie, this is good,” he said. She nodded.

  “Well, it was your distraction that took me there.”

  Jimi kissed her hand and Agnes gave him a look so full of love it scalded Rose. She turned away and began t
o gather up the remains of lunch.

  Music, sweet music—wish I could caress … caress …

  * * *

  On the way to the ranch, Rose watched the violet layers of dusk drift onto the tops of the hill. She was thinking about the time, in her twenties, when two of her friends, Eva and Richard, had broken up. They were the first of their crowd to live together, and the first to separate. Eva moved in with her for a few months, a long winter when Rose faintly resented the fact that Richard couldn’t come round anymore. She and Eva did gloomy girl projects, like making candles. Then one night Richard turned up, ostensibly to retrieve some records. Eva was playing Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” over and over. Richard sat wordless at their kitchen table. When “Tangled Up in Blue” came on, Rose had to flee the apartment, jogging to the 7-Eleven for milk they didn’t need. The song was too bitterly true. When she returned there was no sign of either of them but the door to Eva’s bedroom was closed, and the record was still playing.

  They stayed apart, but after that night Richard was back inside their circle. The two of them could be very funny together, at parties. And years later, when Eva had her surgery, he walked her dog every day. True love is hard to vanquish.

  Sitting behind Jimi and Agnes in the El Dorado, driving into darkness, Rose made some decisions. She would tell her editor that Hendrix was nowhere to be found—the whole thing was a hoax—and that Agnes Martin on her own was not enough for a story. Too old, too difficult, and her paintings were impossible to reproduce. The paper was always happy to kill an art story anyway. She’d pitch the Sedona energy fields instead. Ellen would go for that.

  As soon as they got back to the house, Jimi began preparing dinner and Rose went to the shed. She shivered; in the desert the nights were suddenly cold. Sitting on the cot under the single light, she opened the letter. A stiff RSVP card slid out. The gold lettering was a bit much, but at least the wedding would be in Philadelphia, not Palm Springs, where Judy’s parents now lived. Then she turned on her phone to call Ryan and Ceri. “Are you sure?” said solicitous Ceri. “I’ll rent a car,” Rose answered. “We should all go down together.”

  Exfoliation

  Steam filled the darkened room, along with the smell of eucalyptus.

  “Just close your eyes.” Her voice was low, with a pleasant accent, neither American nor British. The tips of her long blond hair swung against my shoulders. She stroked my jaw to let me know she was about to begin, then covered my eyelids with damp discs of cotton.

  The room was narrow, like a berth on a train. Lying there I remembered why I don’t like facials. It has to do with the claustrophobia of the small cubicle, the disorienting fog of heat and steam, and the upside-down face of the aesthetician, with a smiling red slash and teeth where her forehead should be.

  She removed the discs and I looked up at her. Her pale skin was poreless and faintly powdery, like fresh drywall. My face was bathed in her warm odorless breath. I had an urge to flee, to run out the door in my smock and paper slippers. But in three days I was going to a wedding, the wedding of my ex-husband, Eric, and I wanted to look my best.

  A thick magnifying glass on a metal arm swung over my face and her eyes grew huge, like fish swimming by the glass of an aquarium. She ran a finger along my jawline, where a line of small white bumps lurked.

  “Guess it’s been a while since we’ve seen you.”

  “Yes. More than a year, actually.” Do not feel shame, I told myself.

  “Okay, lots to work on here.” She swiveled away to turn up the steamer and prepare some new unguent. The air in the room grew thicker and whiter. The two of us floated in our little heaven.

  She gathered her hair back into a low ponytail with a scrunchie so it wouldn’t get in the way, and bent over my face, like someone in prayer. Her blue eyes were tilted up at the corners. Inverted, this gave her a slightly sad or rueful expression. I tried to read the name tag pinned on her uniform. G—something. Gwendolyn? Gwyneth? Gloria?

  Settling on a stool behind my head, she poured a lotion into the cup of her hand and began to smooth it on my face, stroking up from the jaw. It felt cool, menthol and tingly. The feel of her hand triggered a little swoon of tenderness in me. How long had it been since anyone had touched my face like this? The agenda-free caress: we never get enough. As G began to paddle away at my jawline and Balinese music wafted into the room through a vent in the ceiling, I went over the chronology of what had happened with Eric one more time.

  The marriage had survived so much, with adulterous skirmishes on both sides. Sometimes we were just looking at each other across a great distance, two people on opposite banks of a cold rushing river. And whenever he was working on a film, everything in our lives went on hold, including me.

  But we had lasted. How many other married couples had stayed together, among our friends? Two or three. One co-dependent toxic pair, an okay one, and a loving, thriving, enviable couple. Until the woman got cancer, and died.

  In fact it was when Eric and I were getting along smoothly and Ceri and Ryan were settled in school that the trouble hit. “Looks like we’re in it for the long haul,” he had said to me on our tenth anniversary, raising a glass. Our Elmore Leonard version of tenderness.

  G’s hair brushed my face. “I’ll start with some extractions and then I’ll work on the puffiness,” she said. “I like the hijiki mask, myself, for circulation and lift. It’s Japanese seaweed with lots of antioxidants. Plus some alpha-hydroxy.”

  “Sounds good.”

  I found the pseudo-scientific language of skin care silly, unquantifiable, and almost religious. But I wanted to put myself in her hands.

  She got to work tweezing the side of my nose with her index fingers, pushing out tiny pencil-points of black. This was the fun part, really. Everyone likes squeezing zits, whether they’re yours or someone else’s. Grooming stirs deep reptilian brain pleasure. As she squeezed, an image came into my thoughts, of that lifeguard … Doug. From Guelph. I worked with him at summer camp when I was seventeen. He had big welty pimples and pitted craters on his back, like Richard Burton’s face. During afternoon rest period a bunch of us would lounge around behind the staff quarters, on the broad, satellite-dish rocks of Georgian Bay, and Doug would let me work my way through the moonscape of his scarred back. A sweet, peaceful interlude.

  Most of my friends are single now, or divorced. One widow, about to remarry. When Eric and I were together, still dealing with his son’s anger after he divorced, sometimes I wondered what our friends thought about our marriage. Did they wish they were us, or were they grateful to be living their uncoupled, unencumbered lives? People stay in a marriage for many reasons. Fear and inertia, or choice and love. In most cases a bit of all four.

  “So how’s your week been so far?” said G as the steam hissed companionably.

  “Not too bad. Getting ready for a wedding in a few days.”

  “Not yours!” she said, rearing up in delight.

  “Oh, no. Just someone I know.”

  “We’ll make you outshine the bride,” G said, nipping away at my jawline, at those tiny hard white ones.

  “Well, I’d be very happy if you did,” I ventured, “because she’s marrying my ex-husband.”

  G didn’t know what to say to this. But something about the whole cleansing routine was disinhibiting me, as they say in the geriatric world. Out with all the toxins, I thought, including those little black dots of impacted memory.

  “It turns out they’d been sleeping together for some time,” I said with a sort of chuckle. “While we were together.”

  “Huh, wow,” said G. “Not good!”

  “No, not good indeed. I think it had been going on for years. But I never did manage to sort that part out.”

  “Did you know her? The bride?”

  “She was his therapist, actually.” Another cackle escaped me. Really, the whole saga was hilarious. “I even saw her a few times myself, to discuss our relationship.” G tactfully sat back for a
moment, then bent again to her work. The skin of my face began to sparkle with a pleasant pain, as if I’d been lightly slapped.

  “So what was she like?”

  “I found her humorless and arrogant. But attractive, in a blowsy sort of way.”

  “What kind of therapy did she practice?”

  “Cognitive-behavioral.”

  “Which is?”

  “Short-term, results-based. It’s about changing your mental habits, rather than talking about Mum and Dad. Although some of that might have been a good idea too.”

  “I’m sorry. That must have been sooo hard for you.”

  A therapist line: she was good at this.

  “As a matter of fact, it was.” Two tears swelled in the corners of my eyes, and rolled down my temples. G swabbed them away with a cotton disc.

  “I had my suspicions for a long time before he told me. Occasionally I’d flay away at him, interrogate him. But he said I was just being paranoid, and feeling old. We’d been together for twenty years, after all. Two kids, his son and our own, a daughter. And unfortunately I saw him as someone who was incapable of lying. He used to be so transparent when we first met, an open book.”

  “That rings a bell,” said G with a thin, lopsided smile.

  “He couldn’t even hide a parking ticket. But then somehow he caught on. He learned how to lie right under my nose.”

  “Oh yeah.” Half her mouth smiled.

  “I mean, I can lie, like most women I’m pretty good at it, but I didn’t think he was capable of it. I was almost impressed that he had pulled it off.”

  “Men are such douchebags,” G said, shooting a tiny black projectile out of my cheek. She finished the extractions, which left a trail of stings on my skin, like a hot rain falling. Then she began massaging my face, drawing her hands up my neck and gently paddling away under my jaw.

  “Gets the lymphatic system active and draining.”

  “What about you?” I asked, straining my eyes up to find hers. “Are you married?”

  “In a way,” she said. We laughed. “My husband’s a musician, so he’s away a lot, on the road.”