Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [42]
So. She was up on a stool at the counter—and up on the turret of her swiveling haunches, rising in her seat whenever they crossed or uncrossed, uncrossed or crossed. Rodney stared. There she sat, drinking milky tea from a braced glass, being bawled at by some ball game on the perched TV, and exchanging vigorous but inaudible small talk with a hidden figure behind the bar. Unquestionably she was a person of color, and that color—or so it seemed to Rodney—was american. As in black, brown, american; then beige, white, pink … Beyond this room lay another room, where some kind of talent contest was being noisily disputed. Poetry readings. Monologues. Stand-up.
Rodney was staring at her with a pang of recognition, although he knew she was a stranger. He thought he had seen her before, in the neighborhood. But never fully seen her. Because she was the woman on the street whom you never see fully, sent here to elude you, always turning away or veering off, or exactly maintaining parallax with mailbox or tree bole, or vanishing forever behind the burning glass of a phone booth or under the black shadow of a truck. Indignant poems have been written about these women—about these desaparacidas. Even the douce Bloom grew petulant about them. Men mind, because for once they are demanding so little, no contact, just a free gaze at the moving form. And this was Rodney’s initial disposition. He didn’t want to date her. He wanted to paint her.
“There you go, sir.”
“Thank you most awfully.”
“That voice!”
Even now, at the bar, she always seemed to be occluded or eclipsed. In particular a pink lady, a Germanic middle-aged blonde with a whole reef of freckles and moles on her bared throat (how Rodney struggled, each day, with such imperfections in his sitters) kept masking her, kept hiding her and then revealing her. Suddenly the view cleared, and he absorbed the lavish power of her thighs—then her face, her glance, her unspecific smile. What she said to him was Talent. Not just her talent. His talent, too.
“Waitress! Waitress! Ah. Thank you. I wonder if you would very kindly lend me your pen there. For just a couple of minutes.”
“Certainly!”
“Thank you so much.”
He knew what to do. At his agent’s prompting, Rodney had had some cards printed up, headed: Sir Rodney Peel (Baronet): Portraitist. The flip side gave an example of the portraitist’s art: looking like non-identical twins, the wife and daughter of a burglar-alarm tycoon were pooling their repose on a pair of French armchairs. Rodney started writing. He still wasn’t entirely reconciled to that bracketed “Baronet.” At first he had argued for the more discreet and conventional abbreviation, “(Bt).” But he had eventually submitted to the arguments of his agent: according to Rock, Americans might think that Bt was short for Bought.
In the great wreaths and plumes of his embarrassing calligraphy Rodney said that he was an English painter, come to America; said how rare it was, even in this city, with its famed diversity, to encounter a face so paintable as her own; said he would, of course, remunerate her for her indulgence; said his rates were high. Rodney then used up a second card and most of a third with a fantastic array of apologies and protestations, of microscopic diffidencies—and then added a fourth, for her reply.
“Waitress? Excuse me! Excuse me!” Rodney’s voice was having to contend with the espresso machine and the robust applause coming from the back room, as well as with the gasps and hiccups of human communion, all around: like a schoolyard. But Rodney’s voice was bigger than he was. Trained by centuries of hollering across very large rooms.
“Ah. There you are.”
The waitress stood there as Rodney outlined her mission. And it seemed that her avowed preparedness to listen to Rodney’s voice all day came under immediate strain. Her face toughened, and she knocked a fist into her hip as her shoulders gave a single shrug or shudder. But Rodney just tapped his calling cards