Painted Ladies

“I could come back,” she said.

I stood up.

“Come in,” I said. “Talk to me. I’m lonely.”

She opened the door all the way and sort of darted through it, as if she didn’t want to waste my time. I gestured for her to sit in a chair in front of my desk. She scooted to it and sat down. She was carrying a green rain poncho.

“May I put this on the floor?” she said. “I don’t want to get your furniture wet.”

“Sure.”

She was kind of thin, and seemed to be flat-chested, although the bulky brown sweater she was wearing didn’t allow a definitive judgment. Her face was small. Her skin was pale. I saw no evidence of makeup. She put the poncho on the floor and perched on the front edge of the chair with her knees together. She smoothed her ankle-length tan skirt down over them. She folded her hands in her lap for a moment, then unfolded them and rested them on the arms of her chair. Then she refolded them in her lap and sat forward.

“Sometimes I think loneliness describes the human condition,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m not lonely. I was just being, ah, lighthearted.”

She nodded. We sat. Now that she had settled on what to do with her hands, she was motionless. I smiled. She looked down at her hands.

“I’m Rosalind Wellington,” she said. “Ashton Prince . . . was my husband.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

She nodded and looked at her hands some more.

“They told me you were with him when he died,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

She was silent. I waited. I could hear the rain splattering on my window behind me.

“I have to know everything,” she said.

“About?” I said.

“I am an artist, a poet. Images are how I think. Perhaps even how I exist. I have to see every image of his death before I can internalize it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I have to be able to imagine everything,” she said.

“What do you know?” I said.

“He is dead,” she said. “Can I say it? Murdered! With a bomb.”

“What else do you want to know,” I said.

“Everything. I need to know what the sky looked like. I need the smell of the roadside, the song of the bomb. Did it startle the birds and make them fly up? Did insects react in the grass? Was there any reaction from the universe, or did the ship sail calmly on? I need to know. I need to see and hear and smell in order to feel. I need to feel in order to make something of this. To create something that will rise above.”

All this time she had not looked up from her hands.

“He never knew what hit him,” I said. “He didn’t suffer.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But give me details. I need images. The police tried to spare me. And I suppose in their earthbound way, they were trying to be kind. But they don’t understand. Was he badly disfigured?”

I took in a deep breath and said, “He was blown into small bits unrecognizable as anything except blood spatters.”

She hunched her shoulders and put her hands to her face and kept them there while she breathed deeply.

Finally she said through her muffling hands, “Please go on.”

I told her everything I could. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know if she was heroic or crazy. But it wasn’t a judgment I needed to make. People grieve in their own ways, and she had the right to get what she thought she needed. She listened with her face in her hands until I was done.

“That’s all there is,” I said.

She raised her face, dry-eyed, and nodded.

“If I can make a great poem out of Ash’s death,” she said, “then perhaps he can, in his way, live on in the poem, and perhaps I can, too.”

“I hope so,” I said.

She nodded sort of absently. Then she stood without another word and left.

10

It was very odd,” I said to Susan.

We were sitting on her couch with our feet up on her coffee table. She was drinking some pink champagne I had brought. I was drinking some scotch and soda that she kept for me. We had conspired on a lamb stew for supper, and it was simmering in a handsome pot on Susan’s stove. Pearl was in the bedroom, asleep on Susan’s bed, which made it easier to sit with my arm around Susan. I was pretty sure that when supper was served, Pearl would present herself.

“Very,” Susan said.

The conspiracy on the lamb stew had been Susan putting out the pots and the cutting board and the utensils, and me cooking it while she sat at her kitchen counter and watched appreciatively.

“She even alluded to ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ ”I said.

“The Auden poem?” Susan said. “How’d she do that?”

“She wanted to know if, in effect, the universe took note of the murder or if the boat ‘sailed calmly on.’ ”

“Wow,” Susan said. “Isn’t that the poem which says ‘the torturer’s horse scratches his innocent behind on a tree’? Or something like that.”

I leaned forward on the couch and took the champagne from the ice bucket and poured her a little more of it.

“It is,” I said.

“Perhaps Auden knew things that Rosalind doesn’t,” Susan said.

“ ‘About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters, ’ ”I said.

“Can you recite the whole poem?” Susan said.

“I believe I can,” I said.

“Don’t,” she said.