“Melissa, please, you have to tell me where he is. I have to talk to him, or just see him. Just once.”
“We had an agreement, Martin.”
I gestured to my paintings as if she could see them. “They’re all here, more than a dozen. What more do you want from me?”
She didn’t respond right away. I wanted to reach through the telephone and shake her.
“I want one more,” she said. “One that’s about you. I want a self-portrait.”
“I don’t do self-portraits.” It was a policy of mine. In the age of selfies, the last thing the world needed was my mug on canvas. Maybe I was afraid too, that a self-portrait might reveal something about me I’d rather not face.
“It’s not fair for you to interpret everyone else, without turning that same discerning eye on yourself. I want a self-portrait, Martin. Then you’ll have satisfied your end of the bargain.”
I pounded one fist on the countertop and raised my voice. “Do you care about me at all, Melissa? Or is it only about these goddamn paintings?”
When she spoke, it was with complete control, ice-cold. “I’ve had many lovers, Martin, and I didn’t hunt them down for generations. I came for you because of your talent, which you still haven’t fully realized. That scholarship that paid for your art school? It came from me, because I believed in you even when you didn’t. I made you who you are. You fucking owe me these paintings and much more, but for now, I’ll settle for a self-portrait. So quit your goddamned bitching and do it.”
She stunned me silent. She’d paid for my art school? She’d been grooming me even longer than I realized, maybe since she found me at that produce stand when I was twelve. So many secrets. In what other ways had she charted my destiny without me knowing?
“Fine,” I said into the phone. “But you’d better hold up your end of the deal, or I’ll find these paintings, wherever they are, and slice them to shreds.”
I didn’t wait for her response. Instead I threw the phone on the couch. I abandoned what I’d been painting and set to work on my final piece for Nicky’s collection, a self-portrait of the artist. It was ugly and raw, but it was exactly how I felt. It was my beating heart on a table next to piles of empty soda cans and junk food wrappers with me sitting on the couch behind it with a hole in my chest. I cut the canvas out completely so that you could see right through the painting. Over my eyes was a blindfold.The blind painter.It was very reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s work. Within hours of finishing it, with the paint still wet on the canvas, Melissa showed up on my doorstep.
She always knew when I’d been painting.
20. The Diner
SHE CALLEDNicky at once, and he sent his people over. Their speed and efficiency made me wonder if they’d been on standby. Perhaps she’d taken my threat of destroying my paintings seriously. Perhaps she should. They even took the self-portrait, the blind painter, still wet.
“It’s hideous, Martin,” Melissa said to me upon seeing it. “Hideously beautiful.”
One of Nicky’s minions had to ride in the back of the van, making sure nothing bumped into it on their way to the gallery. They didn’t finish packing up until around three in the morning.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” Melissa said to me.
“I’m not hungry,” I said in a surly tone.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight since—” She looked away. “—since the beginning of summer. You want to be healthy, don’t you?”
“I’m not healthy, Melissa, and I doubt you give a shit anyway.” Maybe I was being too harsh, but I was pissed, running on empty, and still desperate to find Andre.
“Go take a shower, Martin,” she said sternly, “and then escort me to breakfast like a proper gentleman.”
I didn’t know what it was, the strange power she had over me, which began lifetimes ago, but I did as she asked. We drove to some all-night diner that she wanted to try. It was all the way on the other side of town, which soured my mood even more.
“We could have gone to the place down the street,” I bitched. “It’s not like this is going to be some fine-dining experience.”
“You’re such a snob, Martin.”
The diner had the look of theNighthawkspainting, situated on a corner lot with a row of windows across the front. You could see the diners sitting at the counter, though there weren’t any glamorous redheaded women, just the insomniacs, graveyard shifters, and transients. It was empty enough that we had our choice of booths. I slouched into my side of it. I thought I wasn’t hungry, but when I smelled the fry grease, my mouth started to water. I hadn’t eaten all day.
I ordered a lot of food—eggs, bacon, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, toast with jam, orange juice. The server lifted her eyebrows at my order. Melissa had coffee and a slice of cherry pie. When the food came, I devoured it like a quarterback.
“This is really good,” I told Melissa. The gravy had something like smoked sage in it. The biscuits were light and buttery and the hash browns were crisp and fresh, like they hadn’t been sitting for too long. “Is yours okay?” She’d hardly taken a bite of her pie.
“It’s fine,” she said primly. I watched as she plucked a hair from her head, wound it around her fork and inserted it into the jellied part of the pie, then slowly pulled it out. She signaled to the server.
“Melissa, what are you doing?” Working in a restaurant, we were extremely sensitive to health code issues. Melissa was basically faking a hair in her food, which was breaking the cardinal rule of the service industry: don’t fuck over your own people.
