Picture This

*

Felix ran his finger down the outline of this younger, unknown version of the woman he’d just made love to. She appeared so adolescent, that funny juxtaposition of sheer bravado, confidence and vulnerability, at the crossroads of fate. He lifted the page and sniffed the image; his fingertips had left a trace of her scent on the page. Time folded against time, past, present… And future, he completed the sentence. I am your future, even if you don’t know it.

He flicked through the rest of the catalogue; her early work had been exceptional, displaying a conceptual wit beyond her years. Even then, he noted, she had the craft to immortalise the work in a way that was lacking in her peers. If Susie wanted to draw like Goya, she could; if she wanted to self-parody like Cindy Sherman, she could. Her psychological commentary on gender and sexuality was the most original he

’d encountered. In his mind, he started composing the catalogue notes for the next show: the aphrodisiac of celebrity – could there be a more seductive potion?

It was then that his gaze fell on the pillow on the other side of the bed for the first time that evening. A long blonde lock of hair lay neatly on top of it – damp, a water stain spreading through the silk. He stared down, his mind not quite able to assimilate the reality of its presence. He picked it up delicately and sniffed it; it smelt musky, of river, the East River. The next moment it hit him.

Horrified, he leapt out of the bed. The vision of Maxine’s long blonde hair floating like a halo around her dead, blank face flashed into his mind. Leaning over, he retched, then, not wanting to touch the hair directly, he grabbed a couple of tissues and carefully picked it up from the pillow (a damp stain left behind like an accusation) and carried it into the bathroom. It took two flushes of the toilet to get rid of it. But who had put it there? Who had known enough to break into his apartment and plant such incriminating evidence?

*

Latisha collapsed against the back of her front door, then stumbled her way to the bathroom. Fighting dizziness, she managed to get her insulin pen from the cabinet and inject herself while sitting on the edge of the bath. As she waited for the insulin to flood through her body she thought about the day. She’d made it. It was now past midnight and she knew both of them would have found the messages she’d left. Did they now feel judgement like the icy fingers of the drowned woman herself? Latisha hoped so.

*

Susie sat at the edge of the bed and rocked herself. She’d placed the slippers into an old shoebox and then locked them in the safe that was built into the cupboard. As if someone would steal them back, as if they might evaporate into the ether as soundlessly as they had appeared. It was a frightening possibility. She needed them as evidence she wasn’t losing her sanity. Now that Maxine had insinuated herself back into Susie’s life, the shape of Felix still resonating in her body felt like a betrayal, as if she had been unfaithful. Infidelity to a ghost, to a memory? It was an absurd thought, she concluded, staring up at the nightshades that shifted with the light from the street outside.

‘You left me, Maxine, not the other way around,’ she said, her voice echoing against the polished concrete floor and bare walls. There was no answer. Tomorrow, Susie thought. Tomorrow I’ll go to Maxine’s last address, see if I can find someone who knew her in her final days.

Outside, the sound of laughter floated up from the apartment below.

*

In the morning she took the slippers out of the safe. In daylight they were even more recognisable: as faded and moulded to the shape of her dead lover’s feet as she remembered.

Susie started to flick through the old emails from Maxine.

Chapter Nine

It had been an interesting day. A day of the high and mighties, her grandmother would have described it, meaning she’d gone out searching for some high-and-mighty knowledge and she’d found it. Latisha had gone down to Fifth Avenue and into the New York Public Library, a building she had been fond of ever since her grandma had taken her there as a six-year-old, telling her the two stone lions at the entrance were there to stop the books from running away, the ones that had got sad and droopy because no one was opening them up and reading them. Them books like people, Latisha. They need to be heard, otherwise they die of loneliness.

Latisha had used the place as a retreat ever since, sometimes just to sit in the warm reading room with its huge arched windows running either side and the grand high ceilings with those paintings that Latisha liked to think of as paintings of heaven. It was also a good place to find information. She’d looked up Felix Baum in their index and had pulled up several references that were interesting. In a Time magazine article about Edward Hopper, she’d seen a painting in the same style she’d last seen in the back office of his gallery. It was the night of the exhibition and she’d trailed after Maxine looking for another glass of that nice red wine. The painting – of a woman sitting on the edge of her bed staring out of the window at the Manhattan sky – had spoken to Latisha immediately. An angular square of flat yellow sunlight falling across the floor had particularly caught her attention; it seemed to embody all those long summer days she now felt she had wasted in longing, the dense yellow grabbing at the back of her eyes, drilling into her memory. She knew that feeling of displacement, of floating above the bed, wondering what anchored her to the world. Struck by the beauty of the work, she’d stopped stock-still before it, released only when Maxine had told her who the painter was, a great American – Edward Hopper.

Now, as she stared down at the other paintings in the magazine, Hopper’s work spoke to her again. One, Hotel Lobby – painted in 1943 – seemed to her to capture the way every hotel lobby must have looked in those years, with three folk ignoring each other, marooned in their own islands of loneliness like rich white folk often are. She found herself wondering whether this wasn’t the lobby of the Washington Square Plaza Hotel, where in those years her grandmother used to clean in the early hours of the dawn; after that her mother did the same job, and then Latisha herself. And so she sat there, staring down at Hopper’s painting, putting herself into the skin of the young blonde reading in a blue dress, the space above and around her icy somehow. The lady reminded Latisha of Maxine, and this saddened her, made her want to tell the blonde girl trapped in the frame to run from that lobby right now, run for her life before it was stolen from her.

There was another Hopper painting beside it, the same one that hung in Felix Baum’s office. There was a description printed underneath:

Girl in Yellow Square of Light. This painting is one of several early works of Hopper’s, circa 1924, that have recently surfaced after an anonymous collector contacted the gallerist Felix Baum. The discovery has caused great excitement in the art world and among Hopper enthusiasts.

But the painting signified something else, something between Maxine and Baum. Why else would the sculptor have left a photocopy of Girl in Yellow Square of Light, with an address and a name stapled on it, in the hidden box she’d asked Latisha to take care of if something happened to her?

Latisha gazed down, remembering the photocopy and the name and the address pinned to it. The neighbourhood was one she knew well, only four subway stops from her own. She could go see this man, find out more. Maybe he would have some answers.

For the second time that day she felt Maxine’s ghost settling beside her, her small hand reaching out and nestling into the crook of her own massive forearm. It was good to know she was not alone.

*

The morning after seducing Susie Thomas, Felix cornered his housekeeper and questioned her on whether she’d let anyone into the apartment uninvited. Maria, normally the soul of discretion, flushed at his uncharacteristic anxiety.

‘No one, Mr Baum. No one came in. All day. Only the pizza guy you sent around at seven.’

‘Pizza guy? I never organised a pizza delivery.’

‘Mi dios! It must have been him, but it was those Gourmet Pizza guys you use all the time. I thought it had been arranged. I was folding laundry in the back so he offered to put the pizza in the kitchen. Maybe he stole something as well?’

‘Calm down, Maria; nothing’s been taken. What did this guy look like?’