Painted Truth

by Lise McClendon

  ” ‘Scuse, please. ‘Scuse,” the husband said. Since no one opened up around us, I dropped my arm to let them wedge between me and Eden. A well-matched elderly couple, Indiana or Michigan, I guessed. His porkpie hat, weighed down with hundreds of pins, flashed in the late sun breaking through the smoke as he pushed his blue-haired consort ahead of him. “Keep moving, Thelma. Keep moving,” he mumbled.

  By the time the remaining onlookers had reassembled, I was behind Eden. A surly teenager with overgrown shoulders had squeezed into my spot. I peered over Eden’s head in time to see Charlie Frye emerge from the crowd. He stood out among the well-built firemen with his ever-present gray suit, baggy and worn, white shirt, and black string tie. He looked more like the stoop-shouldered insurance agent that he had been before his appointment to chief of police. I had done plenty of work for his agency, appraising art, stolen, damaged, and just insured, before the mayor had elevated Charlie to crime fighting.

  Frye followed two firemen into the Timberwolf’s dark interior. At five forty-five in late July plenty of daylight remained. But between the smoke and the charred interior of the building we could see nothing after they disappeared into the gloom.

  Eden opened her mouth to say something. Nothing came out. Ash sifted down on her dark curls, giving her a powdered look. I felt so bad for her. She had lost her inheritance. She had paid too much for the building two years ago, coming into the market unaware, then spent more fixing it up. She had sunk her heart and soul into Timberwolf Arts. Her dreams — and her finances — were reduced to a pile of ash.

  At last Charlie Frye appeared, talking rapidly and gesturing in a group of men, some of whom were firefighters. Others looked liked cops, or at least public officials. I recognized Danny Bartholomew, a reporter for the Jackson Hole News, who had somehow infiltrated the official circle. I watched them for a moment, saw that the boundary deputies had gone, then grabbed the yellow plastic barrier tape.

  “Go, Eden!” I pushed her under, shuffling and stiff, and followed. She hesitated, clutching her camera bag. “Come on,” I said, pulling her. “It’s your place. You have a right.”

  Frye saw us coming and conversation stopped. The faces of the firefighters were blackened and weary. The policemen’s expressions held a curious mixture of excitement and repulsion.

  “Alix, please. Behind the line,” Charlie Frye said. A fireman took my elbow.

  “This is the owner,” I said, tugging Eden’s sleeve. She stared at them, a horrified look on her face. “She wants to know what’s going on.”

  The men’s eyes bounced from face to face. The fireman dropped his hand. Danny, slight and dark with a scratchy beard, scribbled something in his spiral notebook, leaning forward to catch every word. Eden stood up straighter. She cleared her throat, the most conversation she could muster.

  “Did you have an employee working in the building this afternoon?” Frye said. He glared at her with drooping gray eyes. “Miss Chaffee, is it?”

  Eden nodded.

  “You had an employee?” he said. Another nervous nod. “Who was it?”

  I stepped back, glancing into the black depths of the gallery. The cause of the commotion inside was suddenly clear. My breath caught in my throat. On the same wavelength, Danny B. scribbled furiously. Eden stared at Frye, then at the firemen in their yellow slickers and helmets, their tired, smudged eyes.

  “Who?” I whispered to her. “Who was it?”

  She looked at me, blinking furiously. “Ray.”

  “Ray Tantro?” She nodded. He was the artist whose pieces she had been showing for the last several weeks, horrible, abstract stuff that hadn’t been popular, hadn’t sold at all. I kept my opinion of his work to myself, which may or may not have helped Eden. It made no difference now.”

  “The artist,” I told Frye. He frowned at me, the gray stubble on his head moving forward to meet black eyebrows. “The artist who was showing at the gallery,’1 I explained. “Ray Tantro. He was big in the seventies. Trying to make a comeback.”

  “But he didn’t come in,” Eden said, her voice cracking. “He was supposed to show up at three so I could go with you, Alix. I was taking photographs of Alix on the river. But he didn’t come in.”

  “You didn’t see the employee, this Ray?” Frye asked.

  “I just locked up,” she said, looking guiltily at me. “Business was slow.”

  “What is it, Charlie? Was he…?” I glanced at the burned hulk of the building.

  Charlie’s face was a flat, controlled mask. “Looks that way,” he said.

  They brought out the body zipped into a black plastic body bag on a stretcher. We couldn’t see it, thank God. Frye said he was burned pretty badly, not much left. He figured Ray Tantro showed up late, opened up with his own key, and proceeded to burn the place down. A dramatic way to kill yourself, Charlie mused, but effective. Probably drank himself unconscious in the process, from the looks of the debris.

  We watched as the ambulance crew loaded up the charred remains of the once-great artist. Slowly, without fanfare, the ambulance pulled away.

  Ray Tantro did not leave this earth in a pleasant way. The old Norsemen would say that human existence is a difficult, painful thing, followed by destruction. That man must struggle, with the help of his gods who control his all-too-certain fate. Odin, the benevolent father, even tested poor Thor, making even gods prove themselves worthy of Valhalla.

  I wasn’t sure, as I held Eden Chaffee on the evening of the destruction of her dreams, whether the old Norsemen knew what the hell they were talking about. There had to be pleasure, didn’t there? The Norsemen, for sure, never experienced the thrill of Kahuna in a little purple kayak. They were more practical. Their lives weren’t concerned, as mine was, with the pursuit of beauty and truth, two of the most illusive and spectral worldly elements. Life was more simple to the Norsemen, more black and white. Existence had no silver lining. Maybe Ray Tantro felt the same.

  At any rate Tantro probably would have agreed with my cantankerous big brother, who once during a family reunion while well lubricated with aquavit and lutefisk summed up the Norse mentality in his inimitable fashion: Life’s a bitch, then you die.

  2

  AS NIGHT FELL, Eden and I hunkered down upstairs over the storefront of the Second Sun Gallery, in the apartment I call home. For a while after Paolo moved out it seemed too spacious. But the space is only two rooms and a bath, with a main room that includes living, dining, and kitchen. When we first moved in I painted the walls indigo blue and stenciled silver stars and gold suns up by the ten-foot ceiling. I am sick of those stars and the gloom of the dark blue walls, but the thought of getting up on ladders again and repainting makes me tolerate them. A thrift-shop sofa is slipcovered in a wrinkled natural linen that I let my decorator friend Darlene talk me into; the verdict is still out on the home grunge look.

  Behind the sofa stands the only bookshelf I have room for. The low pine case is filled with my collection of books on Norse mythology and the Mighty Thor comic books I have collected since I was nine, kept clean in plastic cases. When my father died I retreated for one summer into the world of the Norse gods, spending long days in the hammock lost in Asgard. I played fantasy games all by myself against invisible foes, with me playing the courageous and brave heroine—the Mighty Thorssen.

  The bimonthly installments of the comic held me together that summer and I continued to collect them, always with a soft spot in my heart for the blond superhero, the Thunder God, Thor. In some way they connected me with the real life-hero I lost that year.

  Lately I’d been looking out my tall Victorian windows at the wooded hills that ring the Hole we call Jackson and thinking about a cabin. The close proximity of the gallery downstairs, the tension and anxiety it had been producing, made me want to escape. Somewhere open and sunny and private, with trees and flowers. It wasn’t just the mess with finances in the gallery, although like in any business when the money’s bad, nothing else really matters. My partne
r cut me no slack just because we had been lovers once. And then there were the tourists, thick as fleas on a dog’s butt at high summer, and just as much fun.

  I tucked Eden in on the couch, her small, sunburned face flushed with wine but peaceful at last. She began to snore, musically at first, then in earnest. I turned from the window and looked at her in the pale light from the half-moon. I should complain. What would she do? All she could think about was Ray Tantro, her client and friend.

  “I should have saved him,” she had cried as we made our way across the damp, ashy grass of the square to my apartment. The crowd had gone home, all but a few die-hard voyeurs. “I should have been there.” Tears streamed down her cheeks. I put my arm around her shoulder again, at another loss for words. Nobody cried like this at home. My mother never shed a tear in front of me.

  “I knew he drank too much,” Eden sobbed. “Just last week I saw him at the rodeo, hanging around the stands with the cowboys drinking beer. He yelled at me, something obnoxious, you know. I didn’t know what to say so I just ignored him. Pretended I didn’t hear.” Her cries deepened, her face contorted. I took her hand and led her through the gallery and up the back stairs to the apartment, the hollow sound of our footsteps on the wooden stairs making me lonely.

  “Did he seem depressed or anything?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He sometimes got down when he drank. Usually he wanted to go dancing.” She started to cry again, squeezing her eyelids together as she sat on the edge of the sofa. “I think I kind of loved him.”

  “Oh, hon. I didn’t know,” I said, sinking into the armchair facing the couch.

  “I’m not sure, you know,” she said through sobs. “And now I’ll never find out.”

  I covered my battered eyes with my hand, careful not to press too hard. Ray Tantro, burned to death. Lost love. Lost gallery. I didn’t see how it could be worse.

  “You didn’t know he was going to do this. And even if you had, what could you do? You can’t save somebody who really wants to kill himself. I’m sure you made him happy, Eden. I mean, you tried.” I heard myself talking, talking, just saying anything to stop the tears.

  To my surprise she sniffed hard and stopped crying. “You think so?” She blew her nose on a tissue. “I guess you’re right. What could I do? He was a strong man.”

  The crying was over as fast as it began. Then her face reddened and she pounded the arm of the sofa. “I just wish he’d talked to me. About the gallery and everything. I only wish I knew …” Her voice trailed off.

  “… Why he burned down the gallery too?” It did seem odd. Most people commit suicide in the privacy of their own homes. “I wonder. Maybe it was those new paintings,” I said. The paintings he’d done twenty years ago were exquisite masterpieces compared to this crap. I was trying to picture his early works, thinking of shows I’d seen and articles I’d read, when I remembered the small Tantro oil I bought back in the seventies. I had it stored away. I’d forgotten all about it.

  Eden was glaring at me, her dark eyes red-rimmed but fierce. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I shrugged it off. “Nothing. Just that maybe his comeback wasn’t, ah … coming back?” Eden looked like she was going to cry again. “Only a thought.”

  She pulled a cigarette from the box in her purse. “Got any matches? Oh, never mind.” She took out a matchbook and lit her cigarette. “Jesus, Alix, what a day.”

  I watched her face as she drew on the cigarette and tried to calm herself. Then I moved to the sofa and sat next to her.

  “I’m sorry about everything, Eden. It’s terrible.” There, I felt a flutter of nerves, then relief that I had finally said how I felt.

  She looked at me, then blew smoke the other way. “It’s a piece of shit, is what it is. Not just the gallery. I did like him but…” She slammed her fist on the arm of the chair. “It makes me so mad. That bastard Ray Tantro. What the hell was that all about?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I promise you, Eden, I will find out.”

  Her eyes held mine, clear for a moment. “Your eyes just turned that steely blue color they get when you latch on to something. Like when you latched on to me, and whipped the Timberwolf into shape.” Her anger had disappeared. She bit her lip, slumping into the chair. “I’ll never forget that, Alix.”

  It had been a long day. I was still wearing my swimsuit and river shorts under my yellow chenille bathrobe. The pizza box sat gaping on the coffee table, the pizza barely touched. Eden smoked, angry and exhausted. She drank three glasses of wine and passed out. I covered her up with a goose-down comforter, stubbed out her last cigarette, and turned out the light.

  FROM MY BEDROOM window I can look out across the town square. Through the tall pines and elms that shade the grass and antler arches from the moon’s glare I made out movement in the light in front of the blackened hulk of Timberwolf Arts. They would be digging around in there all night, I supposed. I wondered what changes the fire would bring to the square, if a fancy new structure would fill that corner. I was missing Eden’s charming old building already.

  I peeled off the swimsuit and got into old sweats that provided security on cold or lonely nights. (Okay, yes, I wear them just about every night.) I pulled my arms tight around my ribs. The evening was still. I could hear the faint sound of the honky-tonk band at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar across the square. It had been months since I’d straddled the saddles that doubled as barstools there.

  Jackson can be boisterous and rowdy and then turn around and sleep for weeks, a town of mercurial fits of energy. During slow months you could spit across the square and not hit a soul. When summer starts the locals slap on their “Bring Back Off-Season” bumper stickers and both curse and rejoice in the mayhem. On summer nights flatlanders roam in packs, searching, laughing, spending.

  I looked down on the deserted streets. No flatlanders tonight. The events of the day had put a reality-crimp into vacation bliss. No airing the baby, no necking couples, no cruising for trinkets tonight.

  Ray Tantro, once a wunderkind in the art world, a man destined for greatness before he dropped from sight, was now just an unidentifiable carbon form, roasted like so many marshmallows. Had he been despondent about the new paintings? Sick about his lost affinity with the lucid light of morning? Maybe I was romanticizing his suicide. Who knows, maybe he wanted to go out like a martyr. I wondered about his last years, his last thoughts.

  I hoped Ray’s ride down life’s big river had its rollers and curls and thrills in the heady days of his early fame and glory. I had to believe it did.

  THE PHONE ON my desk rang early the next morning, before opening. Eden had been up with the birds, showered, and dropped off the film of my kayaking run at the photo shop before I emerged from the bathroom. What I’d seen in the bathroom mirror hadn’t cheered me. My nose was still swollen. I could hardly breathe through one nostril. And my eyes had gone technicolor, greens, blues, and yellows. I did what I could with makeup even though it hurt to rub it on. I took three aspirin and cursed Pete Rotondi for good measure.

  I thought that going to work early would take my mind off my rearranged face. I put on my sunglasses and settled into my cubbyhole office, a former walk-in closet in the back of the gallery. The Second Sun occupies a storefront in the middle of the block facing the square, with a glass-filled front wall and a porch overhang above the boardwalk, and cream-colored side walls in the undivided front gallery. Paolo and I had sanded and refinished the wood floors several times over the years and put in new track lighting last winter. We were due for a new paint job when the summer season ended, but the place looked good: clean, warm, minimalist in the best sense, with a focus on Art with a capitals. Despite our fondness for Bierstadt and Russell, we favored more affordable contemporary art with modern techniques and styles—stylized landscapes, impressionism, graphics, ceramics, and weavings.

  I arranged the piles of messages into two groups, In and To Do, scanned the blotter covered
with phone numbers, and dusted the old brass piano lamp before the phone rang. My old wooden desk with its scratched-in names—Gus, Tony 43, Laura, Go Tigers—was like a member of the family. I bought it from an old rancher who said his father used it in a railroad office back in Ohio and brought it west with him. In my office I kept no clock, no radio, no stereo, no television. Last year I had given in to a fax machine, but it sat expectantly idle most of the time, like a wallflower waiting for an offer to dance.

  Above the desk two bookshelves are filled with reference books, directories, and art books: my library. Next to the books a giant Rolodex holds all my contacts in the business. Under the shelves, the only decoration, hangs a framed silkscreen print by Bill Schenck of a cowgirl in sunglasses with shirt agape, a pretty sneer on her lips and a six-gun up by her shoulder ready to blast the next guy that looks at her cross-eyed.

  I had been expecting an hour of quiet—time to think about the events of yesterday, dab extra makeup around the eyes, and rub my desk—so when the old black telephone rattled at me I was annoyed.

  “Good morning,” a male voice said on the line. I hesitated, too long. “It’s me.”

  By this time I recognized both the sexiness and the slight irritation in the voice. It was Carl Mendez, my on-again boyfriend and Missoula cop, whom I talked to on the phone almost enough to recognize his voice.

  “I knew it was you,” I said. “No one else would call this early.”

  “Are you ready to run the river?”

  I groaned, not softly enough.

  “What’s that?” Carl asked. “You’re not backing out?”

  Carl had been taking kayaking lessons in Missoula so that we could run the Snake River together. I’d been doing the same here, putting in numerous hours at the high school pool with Pete. And of course yesterday’s river run.