She only thought: Look at that! Isn’t that the most wonderful picture!
It was an oil painting in a wooden frame, about three feet long and two feet high, leaning against a stopped clock on the left end and a small naked cherub on the right end. There were pictures all around it (an old tinted photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral, a watercolor of fruit in a bowl, gondolas at dawn on the Grand Canal, a hunting print which showed a pack of the unspeakable chasing a pair of the uneatable across a misty English moor), but she hardly gave them a glance. It was the picture of the woman on the hill she was interested in, and only that.
In both subject and execution it was not much different from pictures moldering away in pawnshops, curio shops, and roadside bargain barns all over the country (all over the world, for that matter), but it filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us — the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another’s perspective, at least for awhile, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be.
Her emotional reaction was so sudden, so hot, and so completely without connection to her real, practical life that at first her mind simply floundered, with no idea at all of how to cope with this unexpected burst of fireworks. For that moment or two she was like a transmission that has suddenly popped out of gear and into neutral — although the engine was revving like crazy, nothing was happening. Then the clutch engaged and the transmission slipped smoothly back into place.
It’s what I want for my new place, that’s why I’m excited, she thought. It’s exactly what I want to make it mine.
She seized on this thought eagerly and gratefully. It would only be a single room, true enough, but she had been promised it would be a large room, with a little kitchen alcove and an attached bathroom. In any case it would be the first place in her whole life that was hers
and hers alone. That made it important, and that made the things she chose for it important, too . . . and the first would be the most important of all, because it would set the tone for everything that followed.
Yes. No matter how nice it might be, the room would be a place where dozens of single, low-income people had lived before her and more dozens would live after her. But it was going to be an important place, all the same. These last five weeks had been an interim period, a hiatus between the old life and the new. When she moved into the room she had been promised, her new life — her single life — would really begin . . . and this picture, one Norman had never seen and passed judgement on, one that was just hers, could be the symbol of that new life.
This was how her mind — sane, reasonable, and quite unprepared to admit or even recognize anything which smacked of the supernatural or paranormal — simultaneously explained, rationalized, and justified her sudden spike reaction to the picture of the woman on the hill.
4
It was the only painting in the aisle that was covered with glass (Rosie had an idea that oil paintings usually weren’t glassed in, maybe because they had to breathe, or something), and there was a small yellow sticker in the lower lefthand corner. $75 OR? it said.
She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and took hold of the frame’s sides. She lifted the picture carefully off the shelf and carried it back up the aisle. The old man with the battered briefcase was still there, and still watching her, but Rosie hardly saw him. She went directly to the counter and put the picture carefully down in front of Bill Steiner.
‘Found something you fancy?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’ She tapped the price-sticker in the corner of the frame. ‘Seventy-five dollars or question-mark, it says. You told me you could give me fifty for my engagement ring. Would you be willing to trade, even-Steven? My ring for this picture?’
Steiner walked down his side of the counter, flipped up the pass-through at the end, and came around to Rosie’s side. He looked at the picture as carefully as he had looked at her ring
. . . but this time he looked with a certain amusement.
‘I don’t remember this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Must be something the old man picked up. He’s the art-lover of the family; I’m just a glorified Mr Fixit.’
‘Does that mean you can’t— ‘
‘Dicker? Bite your tongue! I’ll dicker until the cows come home, if you let me. But this time I don’t have to. I’m happy to do it your way — even swapsies. Then I don’t have to watch you walk out of here with your face practically dragging on the floor.’
And here was another first; before she knew what she was doing, Rosie had wrapped her arms around Bill Steiner’s neck and given him a brief, enthusiastic hug. ‘Thank you!’ she cried. ‘Thanks so much!’
Steiner laughed. ‘Oh boy, you’re welcome,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been hugged by a customer in these hallowed halls. See any other pictures you really want, lady?’
The old fellow in the topcoat — the one Steiner had called Robbie — walked over to look at the picture. ‘Considering what most pawnshop patrons are like, that’s probably a blessing,’
he said.
Bill Steiner nodded. ‘You have a point.’
She barely heard them. She was rooting through her bag, hunting for the twist of Kleenex with the ring in it. Finding it took her longer than it needed to, because her eyes kept
wandering back to the picture on the counter. Her picture. For the first time she thought of the room she would be going to with real impatience. Her own place, not just one camp-bed among many. Her own place, and her own picture to hang on the wall. It’s the first thing I’ll do, she thought as her fingers closed over the bundle of tissue. The very first. She unwrapped the ring and held it out to Steiner, but he ignored it for the time being; he was studying the picture.
‘It’s an original oil, not a print,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think it’s very good. Probably that’s why it’s covered with glass — somebody’s idea of dolling it up. What’s that building at the bottom of the hill supposed to be? A burned-out plantation-house ?’
‘I believe it’s supposed to be the ruins of a temple,’ the old guy with the mangy briefcase said quietly. ‘A Greek temple, perhaps. Although it’s difficult to say, isn’t it?’
It was difficult to say, because the building in question was buried almost to the roof in underbrush. Vines were growing up the five columns in front. A sixth lay in segments. Near the fallen pillar was a fallen statue, so overgrown that all that could be glimpsed above the green was a smooth white stone face looking up at the thunderheads with which the painter had enthusiastically filled the sky.
‘Yeah,’ Steiner said. ‘Anyway, it looks to me like the building’s out of perspective — it’s too big for where it is.’
The old man nodded. ‘But it’s a necessary cheat. Otherwise nothing would show but the roof. As for the fallen pillar and statue, forget them — they wouldn’t be visible at all.’
She didn’t care about the background; all of her attention was fixed upon the painting’s central figure. At the top of the hill, turned to look down at the ruins of the temple so anyone viewing the picture could only see her back, was a woman. Her hair was blonde, and hung down her back in a plait. Around one of her shapely upper arms — the right — was a broad circle of gold. Her left hand was raised, and although you couldn’t see for sure, it looked as if she was shading her eyes. It was odd, given the thundery, sunless sky, but that was what she appeared to be doing, just the same. She was wearing a short dress — a toga, Rosie supposed
— which left one creamy shoulder bare. The garment’s color was a vibrant red-purple. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, she was wearing on her feet; the grass that she was standing in came almost up to her knees, where the toga ended.
‘What do you call it?’ Steiner asked. He was speaking to Robbie. ‘Classical? Neo-classical?’