The Hands of Strangers

by Michael Farris Smith

  Why did you put her in a classroom?

  Why did you show her neck?

  Why do you care?

  10

  In contrast to the earlier months when she found it sinful to move more than several feet from the telephone, Estelle has discovered comfort in motion. Run errands that may or may not need running, wash and fold clothes, go out for the morning and evening editions of the newspaper. Keep moving. She has been tempted to tack the city map up on the kitchen wall and sit with the red markers. Twice she has gone to the hall closet to get the box. And twice she stopped herself at the closet door, wrung her hands, and talked herself into cleaning the bathroom. Jon has told her to stop, that he can’t find anything. But he also has told her that the apartment smells like lemons and that he feels better with the windows open. When they sit down to dinner with shiny silverware and a fresh tablecloth, they ignore the fact that there has been no more good news from Marceau.

  Throughout all the cleaning, the poster tube and duffel bag have sat in a corner of the bedroom next to a dresser. She has been careful not to touch them. When Estelle sweeps the floors, she avoids the corner. When she puts clean socks and underwear in the dresser, she averts her eyes from the tube and bag as they remind her of the bad. They remind her of the first days of talking to police, of picking out school photographs, of going without sleep for days. The tube stuck under Jon’s arm like an appendage, as he never left the apartment without it, while she waited in the apartment, the winter light disappearing early in the evening, closing the apartment walls in on her while she waited and waited and waited. She knows if she picks up the tube and opens it, her next move will be to the kitchen with the map and cigarettes and bar stool. She knows that the duffel bag is empty but that it will have that feel—that feel of the metro halls, of the hands of strangers. Look for the good, she thinks as she avoids the corner as if it were occupied by a pack of rabid dogs.

  But today, with fresh towels on the bathroom shelf and the white clothes folded and put away, she sits at the end of the bed and stares at the corner. A dust line changes the shade of the hardwood in front of the bag and tube and forms a dirty triangle as it reaches to the walls. Her hands are on her knees and her right leg bounces nervously. She looks at the clock on the nightstand and she has been sitting and staring for seven minutes, which beats the record of five minutes from two days before. Look for the miracles in the small things, she thinks, but she can’t decide if the miracle is in getting up and walking away or conquering the evil in the corner by treating the bag and tube as if they belonged. She stands, claps her hands, and says, “Let’s go,” then she takes a step toward the door, pauses, and sits back down.

  Somebody knock on the door, she thinks. Or call. Ring telephone. Ring. She puts her hands over her face and groans. Falls back on the bed and looks at the ceiling.

  Do you have faith? Yes. Then you are healed.

  She sits up and looks at the clock. Nine minutes. “This is ridiculous,” she says and she goes to the corner and picks up the duffel bag. She shakes off the dust and unzips it. It is empty, as she thought. She tosses it toward the closet, then she reaches for the tube. She unscrews the cap, again expecting to find nothing, but she notices something inside. Something different, the roll of paper thicker than that of the posters and its edges white and frayed. She pinches it and pulls it out of the tube and she unrolls the canvas. It is too large to hold and look at completely, so she lays it on the bed and places books at the four corners. Estelle stands between the open bedroom window and the canvas, so she steps aside to remove her shadow from the faceless woman.

  The fresh light seems to awaken the painting. The woman is bare to the waist and her legs are long, her knees turned inward as she sits on concrete steps. She appears to be wearing a slip, the straps fallen off her shoulders, and she leans forward with her elbows on her knees and hands dropping between her legs. Her shoulders are frail, almost pointed. It is uncertain how the slip stays up, covering her chest. Her bare feet are also turned inward. The slip is flesh-toned and slightly lighter than her skin and her hair is brown with faint touches of beige blended throughout. The hair is exceptionally long but falls behind her, careful not to cover her body, its length visible from her sides at the small of the back. The steps are gray like an old coin and the lines of the steps are blurred. The last step is behind the woman’s head but the base of the building that begins to appear at the top of the canvas is undistinguished and more blurred than the foreground.

  Estelle sits on the bed, leans over the painting, feels the brushstrokes. She looks at the face and touches it and the paint is smoother than on the rest of the canvas. She searches for a signature at each of the four corners, but there isn’t one. When she sits close to the painting, looking at it from the side, the woman seems thinner, almost sickly. Estelle touches the woman’s hands, the woman’s knees. They look fragile, as if they could be broken with a stiff kick. She touches the woman’s feet, then she feels the concrete steps, half expecting small bits of gravel to flake off on her fingertips.

  She falls back on the bed exasperated, lying parallel to the faceless woman, aware that it can all run together at any moment. Aware that the only thing she can be certain of is that she doesn’t know anything. Miracles? The thought of linking them together feels to her now like a weak excuse for optimism. Then she thinks of Jon and is anxious for him to come home. So this is what he does when he’s supposed to be putting up the posters and handing out the flyers. She rolls on her side and again looks at the woman and she is unable to decide if he’s a son of a bitch or not. His first move when I ask about the painting will tell me. Probably tell me more than I want to know. More than I expect. But if I expect the worst, she thinks, it won’t be so bad. The questions come to her in flashes—how long has the woman been in the tube, where did she come from, is she someone he knows, someone he screws, someone I should hate? The questions keep running until she makes herself stop by looking at the open window and she wonders if falling three flights can kill you, if it would make M. Conrer happy to walk out the front door of the café and be the one who finds her?

  Estelle sits up on the edge of the bed, her feet on the floor. It feels like a different day than it had been ten minutes ago. She stares ahead, her eyes wide and blank like an empty tunnel. Then she goes into the hall closet and finds a hammer and a handful of nails. A mirror hangs on the wall over the dresser and she takes it down and leans it in the corner where the tube and bag had been. She removes the books from the corners of the canvas, and hangs the woman on the wall in place of the mirror. Estelle sets the hammer on the dresser, takes a step back, and stares at her curiously.

  “Who do you belong to?” she asks.

  She kneels and opens the bottom drawer of the dresser. The drawer is where she keeps her lingerie, and as she looks through it she sees colors and touches fabrics she has forgotten. But she knows she has a slip that is flimsy and flesh-colored like the one the woman wears, and after emptying stockings and bras and a boa onto the floor, she finds it pushed toward the back of the drawer.

  She stands and undresses, walks naked to the window, and closes the curtains. Then she puts on the slip.

  The wall that holds the painting faces the bed and Estelle stacks the three pillows on the bed, then climbs on top and sits, hoping the pillows will mimic the concrete steps. But the pillows sag with her weight and her knees rise too high to prop her elbows on them. She goes into the living room and takes more pillows from the sofa and adds them to the stack. Again, she climbs on top and sits and the stack is higher and firmer. Estelle studies the woman, the way the knees are bent, the angle of the feet. She hikes the slip up around her waist, drops the straps from her shoulders. Dangles her hands between her legs so nothing important shows. Estelle’s chest is bigger than the woman’s and the slip holds up easier for her, so her arms are more relaxed. The stack of pillows begins to sag with Estelle’s movement, so she s
ets the pose and she pauses, careful not to cause the stack to tip over.

  And they look at each other. I should let my hair grow, Estelle thinks. And maybe lose a little weight. And take this paint off my toenails. She relaxes the pose and lets herself go limp. She falls over on the bed, lying on her back. A breeze pushes the curtains and she turns her head and watches the waves of the fabric. Steady, delicate waves. She reaches for a pillow and wraps it with her arms. The air is cool on her legs and she covers them with the bed quilt and puts another pillow under her head. Do you have faith? She doesn’t answer herself this time. She closes her eyes and asks again, but before she can decide, she is asleep.

  Estelle sleeps away the afternoon as she stays underneath the blanket, the breeze in the window cooler with each passing hour. She woke once and looked at the clock and saw that she had plenty of time before Jon came home and she went back to sleep.

  After a restless afternoon at work, Jon makes his way home, the metro ride and the walk filled with the painting of Jennifer. It has been four days since he locked himself in the room with her but he might as well still be there as his thoughts remain trapped. He hasn’t been back to see Iris, wanting to give her time to think about what she is doing. At the door of his apartment, he drops his keys, picks them up and drops them again, and screams, “Merde!” From across the hall, a shirtless boy peeks his head out of the door, and Jon apologizes. Then he gets the key in the door, goes inside, and finds Estelle asleep, the mirror on the floor, and the woman on the wall. “Great,” he says and he drops his keys on the dresser. With the noise, Estelle rolls over, stretches, and sits up, covering herself with the blanket.

  “Do you want something to drink?” he asks her. She nods and he goes to the refrigerator and comes back with a beer and a bottle of water. “I think I will drink one of those,” she says and points at the beer. Back at the refrigerator, he swaps the water for a beer, then pauses, thinks of what he will say. As if she can hear his thoughts, she calls out, “It is too late.”

  He returns to the bedroom, hands her the beer, and she pats the bed for him to sit beside her. But he shakes his head and stands.

  “Do you want me to ask the questions or do you want to tell me?” she says.

  “Maybe you should ask.”

  This is not what she wants to hear and she pushes away the blanket and stands up. He looks at her and then at the painting, then says, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “No. I get to ask the questions. And I want to know what the hell you are doing?”

  Jon moves his head back and forth between Estelle and the woman in the painting. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “What are you doing?” he asks again.

  “Stop asking me that. I want to know where this came from and why it was in the tube where the posters were supposed to be. Did you even put them up?”

  “Yes, I put them up. Every goddamn one of them. If you went out of the house every now and then, you’d see them.”

  “I go out of the house.”

  “Okay. Out of the neighborhood.”

  “I go out of the neighborhood. Don’t make this about me. You are the one who has this,” Estelle says and she points at the painting. “Why is she a secret?”

  “She’s not a secret. I just forgot about her in the tube. That’s all.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know who she is. She looks a lot like you right now. Or you look like her. Why are you dressed like that?”

  “Where did you get her?”

  “I was . . . I was out one day and . . .” he begins to answer, then he trails off. Estelle watches closely and his thoughts scatter behind falling eyes, and it appears certain now that he has done something he wasn’t supposed to do.

  She sits down on the bed, her back to him. “I don’t know why you can’t tell the truth,” she says, barely above a whisper.

  Jon drops his head. A quiet minute passes, then he moves over to the painting. “I don’t know what the truth is. We don’t have any truths. All we have is question marks and empty hope. I’d give anything for an ounce of truth. A fucking bread crumb of truth.”

  “We have that. They saw her.”

  “Weeks ago. They saw her weeks ago and there hasn’t been a good phone call since. We don’t even know if it was really her.”

  Estelle turns and faces him and her voice sharpens as she says, “I know it was her. You know it was her. At least you knew when it happened. I could look at you and see that you believed it was Jennifer. Only you have empty hope. I’m trying. You don’t try anymore.”

  “Fine. Only I have empty hope. But it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Yes. It changes everything,” Estelle says and she stands from the bed, lets the slip fall off her and to the floor, and she begins to get dressed. When she is done, she drinks from her beer and then says, “If you want to quit, quit. I don’t care. And do you want to know something else?”

  “Sure, Estelle. Tell me something else.”

  “I hate you. I hate you and I don’t want to see you or that piece of shit in the apartment. Take her and go away from me.”

  “Just let me explain.”

  “I don’t care, Jon. I don’t want you to explain. I don’t care what money you wasted to get her or if your girlfriend gave her to you or whatever happened. I don’t care why you didn’t tell me or why you are such an asshole. Even if you do explain, I don’t believe you. You missed the chance. So you leave or I will leave.”

  Jon takes a step toward her and says, “Estelle—”

  “No,” she says and she puts her hands up as if stopping traffic.

  “Estelle, please.”

  “Okay. Then I will leave,” she says and she moves around him and picks up the duffel bag from the floor. “Move,” she says and she pushes him away from the dresser, then she opens the drawers and puts clothes in the bag. Jon watches until the bag is packed and she goes into the bathroom for her toothbrush and shampoo, then he walks into the living room and sits on the sofa and drinks his beer. The bedroom door slams shut behind him.

  Estelle takes what she needs from the bathroom, then she walks over to the painting, rips it off the wall, and tosses it on the bed. Then she zips the bag and throws it over her shoulder and walks out of the bedroom. Jon doesn’t turn his head when she passes and she leaves the apartment without another word.

  The truth, he thinks. Then he gets up for another beer and returns to the same spot. He looks at the pictures on the bookshelf, and the people and their smiles and embraces seem foreign as if they were photographs that came with the frames. He remembers sitting in the same position, with the same beer and the same quiet night after night in Geneva. The pacifying click of the tram passing outside every half hour. The Geneva night air light and clean. Feeling so alone that sometimes it seemed as if he didn’t really exist, that he was only a fixture in the world, like a brick house or an umbrella. And I was happy, he thinks. He lights a cigarette and drinks the beer and listens to the traffic passing along the street. He wonders if Estelle is downstairs venting to M. Conrer but he believes she is past that, that her anger is more independent and strong. And if he could see her walking along the street, her steps firm and fast and her shoulders square like a soldier, he would be assured. He finishes the beer and gets up for another, and this time when he sits back down, he notices Estelle’s purse on the coffee table, giving him until she returns from trying to check into a hotel to figure out what to say.

  He has gone from sitting to lying on the sofa when the apartment door opens and Estelle walks in and looks for the purse.

  “Here it is,” he says and sits up. He points at the coffee table. She moves around the sofa and picks it up without looking at him. She is only steps from being gone again when Jon says, “Estelle, stop. Please. I’ll tell you the truth if you want
to hear it.”

  She stops at the apartment door. “All of it?”

  “All of it.”

  Estelle drops her purse and walks back and sits in the chair.

  Jon leans forward, elbows on his knees, sweating a little. “I was out one day putting up our stuff and I stopped in this bar and I saw this painting and I liked it for some reason.” He sits back and sighs and says, “I liked it because it made me think about Jennifer. I don’t know why. Something about it just made me think about her. The look on her face. It seemed like the way Jennifer might look now. Waiting and wondering. So I went to the artist’s studio. It was only a few blocks away. And I met the woman and saw some of her other work and that painting you found is one of them.” Jon pauses again, rolls his eyes toward the ceiling.

  “And what else?” Estelle asks.

  “And so I asked her to paint Jennifer and she said no and I’ve been going back to try to get her to and she finally started on it and that’s that. We can go see it if you want.”

  Estelle shakes her head. “I thought you said you were going to tell me all of it.”

  “That is all of it, Estelle. It’s not that big a deal. I just forgot about the damn thing in the tube.”

  Estelle stands and walks around the room, behind the couch, looks down at the back of his head. He runs his hand through his hair and says, “Do you want to go or not?”

  “Fine,” she says, folding her arms. “Let’s go.”

  They walk to the metro and ride to Abbesses. It’s a long and quiet ride as if being shared by two people who have never met. When they arrive at the stop, Jon leaves the metro and walks up into the street, Estelle on his heels, following without speaking. During the metro ride, the day has faded and they move in the calm of the twilight. They come to Le Café Perdu and step inside. Jon points to the woman on the wall and says, “That’s the first one I saw.” Before she can look closer, Jon is out the door and walking toward Iris’s apartment. She hesitates, wants to call out to him to wait, let me look, but she doesn’t and she hurries to catch up. She keeps a step behind as he turns the corner onto a one-way street. In the middle of the block is Iris’s building. Jon goes in and she follows him up the stairs and they stand together at her door.