Somehow the cavalier remark of the glazier made me angrier than the probability that Darrel Vickers had vandalized Jo Anne’s house.
“You have a number for this fellow?” I said.
“Get in the house and shut up,” she replied.
* * *
AFTER WE WERE inside, she locked the door and pulled down the shades. “Marvin and the school-bus gang have a way of showing up when they’re out of money,” she said.
“How about Henri?”
“He knows better than to come around.” She went into the sunporch. A painted canvas rested on her easel. “I don’t know how good this is or if you’ll be offended. But this is what I see when I look at you.”
I had never had anyone draw or paint me. Nor was I ever enthusiastic about having my photograph taken, not even for high school or college albums. Now I was looking at myself through someone else’s eyes rather than a camera lens. My face looked bladed, as though there were a sharpness in my soul, yet my expression was uncertain, perhaps expectant or distracted by a presence the viewer could not see.
In the background, a guitar was propped against a modest table with a portable typewriter on it, similar to the Smith Corona I had carried in my duffel for two years. A candle inserted in the neck of a wine bottle was burning on the table, the dried wax on the bottle like pieces of string tied with a series of knots. The mystery of the painting was not me, at least not directly. It was the candle flame that cast shadows on the back wall. The shadows were like the bars of a prison, only slanted.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked.
“It’s a great compliment that you would paint me, Jo Anne.”
“What do you see there?”
“I’m not good at self-inventory.”
“You remember when I said you were a strange one?”
“I have to admit that stuck with me.”
“I was wrong. You’re not strange. You’re exemplary. You’re incapable of deliberately doing wrong. It’s not even a virtue with you. I think you were born full of goodness and have always remained that way.”
“Oh, Jo Anne, that means an awful lot to me, but—”
“If you say what I think you’re going to say, I’m going to hit you.”
“That’s definitely not necessary.”
She pushed me down in a chair. “Stay here. I’m going to bring us some more coffee.”
“How about it on the martial arts stuff?” I said at her back.
She ignored me and came back a few minutes later with the coffee on the tray, then put it on the floor and sat down in a straight-backed cane chair and seemed to lose her concentration. “I don’t know how to approach this, Aaron. The man you saw in the hooded slicker? He pointed and said ‘you’?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“Maybe he was telling me I was guilty of something.”
“A total stranger?”
“That’s what I felt.”
“You were in Korea, weren’t you?”
“If I was, I wouldn’t talk about it.”
“What was your friend’s name? The one who was with you?”