growing realization that the job would never be done; that there was, in fact, more of
the job needing to be done at the end of each day than there had been at the beginning.
This fourth guy, wearing a battered old gimme-cap with the word LIPID printed
above the bill, was the foreman. He was talking to his wife on his cell phone. Coming
home, honey, nah, don’t want to go out, not tonight, too tired, want to get an early
start in the morning. The guys bitched about that but I brought ’em around. Sifkitz
didn’t know how he knew all this, but he did. Just as he knew that the man with the
buckets was Freddy, and he owned the truck in which the men had come. It was
parked just outside the picture on the right; you could see the top of its shadow. One
of the shovel guys, Carlos, had a bad back and was seeing a chiropractor.
There was no sign of what job the men had been doing in the pic ture, that was a little
beyond the left side, but you could see how exhausted they were. Sifkitz had always
been a detail-man (that green-gray blur of forest was very unlike him), and you could
read how weary these men were in every feature of their faces. It was even in the
sweat-stains on the collars of their shirts.
Above them, the sky was a queer organic red.
Of course he knew what the picture represented and understood that queer sky
perfectly. This was the work-crew of which his doctor had spoken, at the end of their
day. In the real world beyond that organic red sky, Richard Sifkitz, their employer,
had just eaten his bed-time snack (a left-over piece of cake, maybe, or a carefully
hoarded Krispy Kreme) and laid his head down on his pillow. Which meant they were
finally free to go home for the day. And would they eat? Yes, but not as much as he
did. They would be too tired to eat much, it was on their faces. Instead of eating a big
meal they’d put their feet up, these guys who worked for The Lipid Company, and
watch TV for a little while. Maybe fall asleep in front of it and then wake up a couple
of hours later, with the regular shows gone and Ron Popeil on, showing his latest
invention to an adoring studio audience. And they’d turn it off with the remote and
shuffle away to bed, shedding clothes as they went without so much as a backward
look.
All of this was in the picture, although none of it was in the picture. Sifkitz was not
obsessed with it, it did not become his life, but he understood it was something new in his life, something good. He had no idea what he could do with such a thing once it
was finished, and didn’t really care. For the time being he just liked getting up in the
morning and looking at it with one eye open as he picked the cloth of his Big Dog
boxers out of the crack of his ass. He supposed when it was done, he would have to name it. So far he had considered and rejected “Quittin’ Time,” “The Boys Call It a
Day,” and “Berkowitz Calls It a Day.” Berkowitz being the boss, the foreman, the one
with the Motorola cell phone, the guy in the LIPID cap. None of those names were
quite right, and that was okay. He’d know the right name for the picture when it
finally occurred to him. It would make a cling! sound in his head. In the meantime
there was no hurry. He wasn’t even sure the picture was the point. While painting it,
he had lost fifteen pounds. Maybe that was the point.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
II. Stationary Bike
Somewhere—maybe at the end of a Salada tea-bag string—he had read that, for the
person who aspires to lose weight, the most effective exercise is pushing back from
the table. Sifkitz had no doubt this was true, but as time passed he more and more
came to believe that losing weight wasn’t his goal. Nor was getting buffed up his goal,