Hit List - Lawrence Block [24]
“Except for the artist.”
“Keller,” she said, “you can’t please everybody. What do you think? You want to do this?”
“I could use the money.”
“Well, who couldn’t? The first payment’s on its way, because I said yes first and then looked for someone to do it. I don’t have to tell you how I hate to send money back once I have it in hand.”
“Not your favorite thing.”
“I get attached to it,” she said, “and I think of it as my money, so returning it feels like spending it, and without getting anything for it. Do you want a day or two to think about this?”
He shook his head. “I’m in.”
“Really? Brooklyn or no, it’s still New York. He’s in Williamsburg, you’re on First Avenue, you can just about see his house from your window.”
“Not really.”
“All the same . . .”
“It won’t be the first time in New York, Dot. Never on a job, but personal business, and what’s the difference?” He straightened up in his chair. “I’m in,” he said. “Now tell me about the guy.”
“I used to paint,” Maggie Griscomb said. “Now I make jewelry.”
“I was noticing your earrings.”
“These? They’re my work. I only wear my own pieces, because that way I get to be a walking showcase. Unless I’m sitting down, in which case I’m a sitting showcase.”
They were sitting now, in a booth at a Cuban coffee shop on Eighth Avenue, drinking café con leche.
“It’s odd,” she said, “because I like jewelry, and not just my own. I buy other people’s jewelry and it just sits in the drawer.”
“How come you stopped painting?”
“I stopped being twenty-nine.”
“I didn’t know there was an age limit.”
“I spent my twenties painting moody abstract oils and sleeping with strangers,” she said. “I figure my twenties lasted until my thirty-fourth birthday, when I got out of some guy’s bed, threw up in his bathroom, and tried to get out of there without looking at him or the mirror. It struck me that I was older than Jesus Christ, and it was time to quit being twenty-nine and grow up. I looked at all my paintings and I thought, Jesus, what crap. Nobody ever bought any of them. Nobody even went so far as to admire them, unless it was some guy desperate to get laid. A horny man will pretend an enthusiasm for just about anything. But aside from that, about the best most people would do was say my work was interesting. Listen, I’ve got a tip for you. Don’t ever tell an artist his work is interesting.”
“I won’t.”
“Or different. ‘Did you like the movie?’ ‘It was different.’ What the hell does that mean? Different from what?” She stirred her coffee and left the spoon in the cup. “I don’t know if my paintings were different,” she said. “Whatever that means. But they weren’t interesting, to me or anybody else. They weren’t even pretty to look at. I was going to burn the canvases, but that seemed too dramatic. So I stacked them at the curb, and somebody hauled them away.”
“That sounds so sad.”
“Well, it felt liberating. I thought, What do I like? And I thought, Jewelry, and I went out and took a class. I had a flair right from the beginning. These are pretty, aren’t they?”
“Very pretty.”
“And it’s okay for them to be pretty,” she said. “I had to work to keep my paintings from being pretty, because pretty art is facile and decorative and doesn’t wind up in museums. So I did everything I could to turn out pictures that no one would ever get any pleasure out of, and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Now I make rings and bracelets and necklaces and earrings, and I purposely make them attractive, and people buy my work and wear it and enjoy it. And it’s really a pleasure not being twenty-nine anymore.”
“You changed your whole life.”
“Well, I still live downtown,” she said, “and I still wear black. But I don’t drink myself stupid, and I don’t hurt my ears listening to loud music . . .”
“Or go to bed with strangers?”
“It depends,” she said. “How strange are you?”
Six
* * *
She was still sleeping when he left around daybreak.