‘Ready-ready-Teddy,’ Cynthia said. Her grin widened, revealing tiny wicked white teeth.
To Rosie they looked like the teeth of some small but dangerous animal: a mongoose, perhaps. ‘ Ger trude Kin shaw, come on down!’
Gert rushed. Cynthia seized her meaty forearms, turned a flat, boyish hip into the swell of Gert’s flank with a confidence Rosie knew she herself would never be able to match . . . and suddenly Gert was airborne, flipping over in midair, a hallucination in a white shirt and gray sweatpants. The shirt slid up to reveal the largest bra Rosie had ever seen; the beige Lycra cups looked like World War I artillery shells. When Gert hit the mats, the room shuddered.
‘Yesss!’ Cynthia screamed, dancing nimbly around and shaking her clasped hands over her head. ‘Big mama goes down! Yessss! YESSSS! Down for the count! Down for the fucking cou—
‘
Smiling — a rare expression that turned her face into something rather gruesome — Gert picked Cynthia up, held her over her head for a moment with her treelike legs spread, and then began to spin her like an airplane propeller.
‘Ouggghhh, I’m gonna puke!’ Cynthia screamed, but she was laughing, too. She went around in a speedy blur of green-orange hair and psychedelic tank-top. ‘Ouggghhh, I’m gonna EEEEJECT!’
‘Gert, that’s enough,’ a voice said quietly. It was Anna Stevenson, standing at the foot of the stairs. She was once again dressed in black and white (Rosie had seen her in other combinations, but not many), this time tapered black pants and a white silk blouse with long sleeves and a high neck. Rosie envied her elegance. She always envied Anna’s elegance.
Looking slightly ashamed of herself, Gert set Cynthia gently back on her feet.
‘I’m okay, Anna,’ Cynthia said. She wobbled four zigzag steps across the mat, stumbled, sat down, and began to giggle.
‘I see you are,’ Anna said dryly.
‘I flipped Gert,’ she said. ‘You should have seen it. I think it was the thrill of my life.
Honestly.’
‘I’m sure it was, but Gert would tell you she flipped herself,’ Anna said. ‘You just helped her do what her body wanted to do already.’
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ Cynthia said. She got cautiously to her feet, then promptly plumped back down on her fanny (what there was of it) and giggled some more. ‘God, it’s like someone put the whole room on a record-player.’
Anna came across the room to where Rosie and Pam were sitting. ‘What have you got there?’ she asked Rosie.
‘A picture. I bought it this afternoon. It’s for my new place, when I get it. My room.’ And then, a little fearfully, she added: ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know — let’s get it into the light.’
Anna picked the picture up by the sides of the frame, carried it across the room, and set it on the Ping-Pong table. The five women gathered around it in a semicircle. No, Rosie saw, glancing around, now they were seven. Robin St James and Consuelo Delgado had come
downstairs and joined them — they were standing behind Cynthia, looking over her narrow, bird-boned shoulders. Rosie waited for someone to break the silence — she was betting on Cynthia — and when nobody did and it began to spin out, she started feeling nervous.
‘Well?’ she asked at last. ‘What do you think? Somebody say something.’
‘It’s an odd picture,’ Anna said.
‘Yeah,’ Cynthia agreed. ‘Weird. I think I seen one like it before, though.’
Anna was looking at Rosie. ‘Why did you buy it, Rosie?’
Rosie shrugged, feeling more nervous than ever. ‘I don’t know that I can explain, really. It was like it called to me.’
Anna surprised her — and eased her considerably — by smiling and nodding. ‘Yes. That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures — it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castle s in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads. But this particular painting . . . is it beautiful to you, Rosie?’
Rosie looked at it, trying to see it as she had in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn, when its silent tongue had spoken to her with such force that she had been stopped cold, all other thoughts driven from her mind. She looked at the blonde woman in the rose madder toga (or chiton — that was what Mr Lefferts had called it) standing in the high grass at the top of the hill, again noting the plait which hung straight down the middle of her back and the gold armlet above her right elbow. Then she let her gaze move to the ruined temple and the tumbled
(god)
statue at the foot of the hill. The things the woman in the toga was looking at.
How do you know that’s what she’s looking at? How can you know? You can’t see her face!
That was true, of course . . . but what else was there to look at?
‘No,’ Rosie said. ‘I didn’t buy it because it was beautiful to me. I bought it because it seemed powerful to me. The way it stopped me in my tracks was powerful. Does a picture have to be beautiful to be good, do you think?’
‘Nope,’ Consuelo said. ‘Think about Jackson Pollock. His stuff wasn’t about beauty, it was about energy. Or Diane Arbus, how about her?’
‘Who’s she?’ Cynthia asked.
‘A photographer who got famous taking pictures of women with beards and dwarves smoking cigarettes.’
‘Oh.’ Cynthia thought this over, and her face suddenly brightened with recollection. ‘I saw this picture once, at a catered party back when I was cocktailing. In an art gallery, this was. It was by some guy named Applethorpe, Robert Applethorpe, and you want to know what it was? One guy gobbling another guy’s crank! Seriously! And it wasn’t any fake job like in a skin magazine, either. I mean that guy was making an effort, he was taking care of business and working overtime. You wouldn’t think a guy could get that much of the old broomhandle down his— ‘
‘Mapplethorpe,’ Anna said dryly.
‘Huh?’
‘ Mapple thorpe, not Apple thorpe.’
‘Oh yeah. I guess that’s right.’
‘He’s dead now.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Cynthia asked. ‘What got him?’
‘AIDS.’ Anna was still looking at Rosie’s picture and spoke absently. ‘Known as broomhandle disease in some quarters.’
‘You said you saw a picture like Rosie’s before,’ Gert rumbled. ‘Where was that, squirt?
Same art gallery?’
‘No.’ While discussing the Mapplethorpe, Cynthia had only looked interested; now color pinked her cheeks and the corners of her mouth dimpled in a defensive little smile. ‘And it wasn’t, you know, really the same, but . . . ‘
‘Go on, tell,’ Rosie said.
‘Well, my dad was a Methodist minister back in Bakersfield,’ Cynthia said. ‘This is Bakersfield, California, where I came from. We lived in the parsonage, and there were all these old pictures in the little meeting-rooms downstairs. Some were Presidents, and some were flowers, and some were dogs. They didn’t matter. They were just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn’t look too bare.’
Rosie nodded, thinking of the pictures which had surrounded hers on those dusty pawnshop shelves — gondolas in Venice, fruit in bowls, dogs and foxes. Just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn’t look too bare. Mouths without tongues.
‘But there was this one . . . it was called . . . ‘ She frowned, trying to remember. ‘I think it was called De Soto Looks West. It showed this explorer in tin pants and a saucepan hat standing on top of a cliff with these Indians around him. And he was lookin over all these miles of woods toward a great big river. The Mississippi, I guess. But see . . . the thing was . .
. ‘
She looked at them uncertainly. Her cheeks were pinker than ever and her smile was gone.
The bulky bandage over her ear seemed very white, very much there, like some sort of peculiar accessory which had been grafted onto the side of her head, and Rosie found time to wonder — not for the first time since she had come to D & S — why so many men were so unkind. What was wrong with them? Was it something that had been left out, or something nasty which had been unaccountably built in, like a bad circuit in a computer?
‘Go on, Cynthia,’ Anna said. ‘We won’t laugh. Will we?’
The women shook their heads.
Cynthia stuck her hands behind her back like a little girl who has been called upon to recite in front of the entire class. ‘Well,’ she said, speaking in a much smaller voice than her usual one, ‘it was like the river was moving, that was the thing that fascinated me. The picture was in the room where my father had his Thursday-night Bible school classes, and I’d go in there and sometimes I’d sit in front of that picture for an hour or more, looking at it like it was television. I was watching the river move . . . or waiting to see if it would move. Now I can’t remember which, but I was only nine or ten. One thing I do remember is thinking that if it was moving, a raft or a boat or an Indian canoe would go by sooner or later and then I’d know for sure. Except one day I went in and the picture was gone. Poof. I think my mother must have looked in and seen me just sitting there in front of it, you know, and— ‘