Picture This

‘My turn: truth or dare?’ Felix asked, smiling.

‘Truth.’

‘Was she your lover?’

‘You know she was,’ Susie replied, unable to maintain eye contact.

Again, Felix amazed himself with his own self-control. Not one flicker of emotion on his face indicated the inner turmoil he now found himself in. Instead he reached out and squeezed her hand.

‘It was one of the reasons I came here, to New York, to find out how she died,’ Susie continued, her voice small and stripped.

‘Suicide, wasn’t it?’ He kept his voice neutral.

‘I guess I thought if I could only find out how she was those last few weeks, maybe find someone who knew her? She’d refused to use any of my contacts. She was so desperate to prove she could get out from under my shadow and make it on her own.’

‘And you feel guilty.’

‘I was angry with her for such a long time, then I was angry with myself for failing to protect her. But y

ou can’t argue with ghosts.’

‘I do, all the time. It’s like that scene from the Luis Buñuel film. The scene when the man is dragging two pianos, two priests and a dead cow across a room, trying to reach the woman he loves. The older we get, the more the past weighs us down. But when you meet someone new, for a moment you forget.’ He reached over and took off one of her shoes, then caressed her foot. ‘You make me forget.’

There was an awkward silence, broken by the sound of a distant car alarm going off far below on the street. Susie pulled her foot away.

‘My turn: truth or dare?’ she persisted, now wanting to block everything out except the fact that she could still look at him and want him.

‘Dare. I’m no good with the truth. It isn’t art.’ At least now he could be honest.

‘I dare you to show me one photograph of you as a teenager.’

*

The photo was black-and-white, and if she hadn’t recognised the eyes she wouldn’t have known this awkward, overweight 13-year-old, dressed in a skiing jacket and trousers, an air of boredom and shyness playing around the face, to be the same man. A very ordinary suburban bungalow, generic to the Midwest, was in the background.

‘This is you?’

‘Not my finest hour.’

‘But I thought you grew up in New Mexico with a hippie radical father who promoted Chicano art?’

‘That is the official spin.’ The possibility of finally being able to own who he really was had begun to rush through him like adrenalin. Susie studied the photograph.

‘This doesn’t look like New Mexico. It looks temperate. Cold, even.’

‘It’s not New Mexico,’ he said falteringly, now fighting the panic, determined to confess.

‘You were on holiday?’

‘No. That flat ugly house I’m standing in front of, that’s the house I grew up in.’

‘So you didn’t grow up in a trailer?’

‘I grew up in the most boring middle-class suburb of Denver. My father was a dentist, my mother was a part-time nurse. The only art we had on the walls were religious prints my mother brought back from her Bible studies, hanging up in the bathroom. It was mind-numbing stultification. As soon as I hit 16, I dropped 70 pounds, dreamt up a new name, took the money I’d saved through paper routes and some small-time pot dealing, and got on the Greyhound to New York City. First six months I worked as a busboy in a pizza joint in Little Italy, spending my days trawling the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, then all the galleries uptown and downtown. When I was thin enough and beautiful enough, and had memorised all the names of the up-and-coming artists and their collectors, I talked my way into Arnold Tuchmann’s gallery. I knew he had a weakness for young boys.’ He stopped, euphoria flooding through him; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so honest with anyone.

She stared at him, both appalled and in awe. ‘Felix! People have written theses on your childhood.’

He laughed. ‘Best piece of art I’ve ever sold. Now you own the original. You, and you alone, a priceless piece of truth. No one else knows except my parents, and they both died five years ago. So you see, I must trust you.’ He edged closer, his hand creeping up her leg again, caressing the soft skin of her inner thigh, teasingly close to her sex. She closed her eyes like a stroked cat, wondering at the layers that made up the psychology of this man, yet recognising the same need for reinvention in herself, and with it the constant terror of being found out.