“Cry.”
“I don’t think my servants would cry—but I would.”
“But I’d get along!”
Joan sighed. “And that platoon I have around me would get along, I think; they’re able or I wouldn’t have them—and I’ve got money enough to make sure that ones like Hugo are taken care of; that’s one of the good things about being rich—if money is all it takes to remedy something, you can. Gigi, there is some solution to this silly fix I’m in and I’m going to find it—I was just trying to show you that it isn’t as simple as it looks on video. The solution may be something as easy as changing my name again and changing my face with plastic surgery and going somewhere else.”
“Oh, no, you mustn’t change your face.”
“No, you’re right; I must not change this face. It’s Eunice’s; I’m only its custodian. If I changed it, Joe would not like it—nor several other people. (Starting with me, Boss.) (I won’t change your lovely face, sweetheart. I’ll cherish it.) “I’ll keep it as it is—but I have to keep it veiled. It’s been on video too much, photographed and printed too many million times. But there’s some way to tackle it.”
Joan Eunice looked at the nearly finished painting almost with awe. She knew what a beautiful body she had inherited; she knew that Gigi was a beauty of another sort; she could see that these “Grecian damsels” were herself and Gigi and she could not see any detail in which the painting was not a perfect likeness of each.
Yet Joe Branca’s “realism” was fantasy. These two nymphs in a glade were voluptuous, sensuous, enticing in a way that she knew that she and Gigi had not been—sprawled on a platform of boards and gossiping about everything from an alcoholic to dirty dishes.
“What do you think?” Gigi asked. “Say what you like; Joe doesn’t give a hoot about any opinion but his own.”
Joan took a deep breath, sighed. “How does he do it? Here I am With my nipples tight just from looking at it—and yet it’s you and me, and we lay there talking for hours and never got in a sweat about it. Discussed everything but Topic ‘A’—wasn’t even a cuddle because we had to hold still. Yet this paint-and-canvas reaches out and grabs you by the gonads and squeezes. I’m certain it would have just as much effect on a man.”
From behind them Joe said, “Fool-the-eye.”
Joan answered, “Fool-the-eye, hell, Joe. My eyes are not fooled, I’m enchanted. I want to buy it!”
“No.”
“Huh? Oh, kark. You planned to sell it to some old butch. God knows ninety-five is old—and I feel butch enough to qualify when I look at the painting.”
“Yours.”
“Huh? Joe, you can’t do this to me. You intended to sell it, you said so. Gigi, back me up.”
Gigi chose not to answer. Joe said stubbornly, “Yours, Joan. You want it, you take it.”
“Joe, you are the most stubborn man I’ve ever met and I don’t see how Gigi puts up with you. If you give me that painting, I’m going to destroy it at once—”
Gigi gasped. “Oh, no!”
Joe shrugged. “Your ache. Not mine.”
“—but if you’ll sell it to me at your going rates, I’ll take it with me and give it to Jake Salomon to hang at the end of his bed so he’ll wake up happy each morning.” (You bombed him, twill! Now swing back and strafe the survivors.) “That’s the choice, Joe. Give it to me and I’ll chop it into shreds. But sell it to me—and Jake Salomon gets it. Oh, you could welch, then hang it for sale—and put me to the trouble of hiring detectives to follow it to where you hang it so that I can buy it through an agent. What I do with it then, I won’t tell. Or you could even keep it for your own jollies; it’s quite a job.”
Gigi said, “Quit being stubborn, Joe; you know you’d like Jake to have it.”
“Gigi, what does Joe charge for a painting like that?”
“Oh, I set the prices. Mostly I sell them by the yard. By size.”