Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [31]
I immediately felt guilty, and at the same time I told myself that I was innocent. I hadn’t done anything, although it sounded almost shameful to put it that way. The detective stood in the doorway sizing me up, then he snapped his fingers. The painting, he said. Bring the painting.
It takes a while for a betrayal to register. At first you deny it. You say, Don’t be silly, or It’s not possible. Then there’s a dead spot, a silence, a regrouping. After that you go slowly, gradually through the character of the other person. You examine all the evidence against the idea of betrayal and you say, No, it can’t be.
Then, like a door swinging on its hinges in a draft, you go back over your history together. You begin to imagine betrayal as a hypothesis—an absurd hypothesis, a bad joke. Skeptically, playfully, you concede that the circumstances could be interpreted that way, but only if it was somebody else who was betrayed, not you. And then, suddenly, you know that it’s true.
The detective had a car and we rode in silence to the Charles Street station, where we went up a flight of stairs to a large room with wooden desks and pale gray-green walls. Except for us, the room was empty. There wasn’t so much crime in those days.
The detective, whose name was something like Scanlon, took the painting from me and stood it on the desk, leaning it against the wall. A Miss Sheri Donatti, he said, had reported the theft of a valuable painting and had named me as the probable perpetrator.
I stared at him because I didn’t want to look at the painting, which embarrassed me in that room. It was like the time I had come home to find Sheri sitting in my mother’s lap. She specialized in such juxtapositions. I didn’t steal it, I said. She gave it to me.
Scanlon shook his head, like a pitcher shaking off a catcher’s sign.
The painting is named after me, I said. It’s her idea of a joke to pretend that I stole it.
People are always joking, Scanlon said, but the law has to take them seriously.
What am I supposed to do? I said. I didn’t ask for a bill of sale when she gave it to me. Do I look like a thief?
Scanlon was wearing a gray double-breasted suit and a pale blue fedora. Detectives had to wear hats in those days as part of their uniform. Now he unbuttoned his jacket. He took off his hat and put it on the desk beside the painting. No, he said, you look like a lover. He swung his feet up onto the desk. He was a big man with big feet. There’s an easy and a hard way to do this, he said. The easy way is for you to leave the painting and let me talk to Miss Donatti.
No, I said. The painting is mine; it belongs to me. She gave it to me and whether it’s valuable or not, I’m going to keep it. At that moment it seemed that this was the only thing she had ever given me, that she had taken back everything else. It wasn’t a question of how much I wanted the painting—it was just that this seemed to be the first clear-cut issue between us, the only time our positions were defined.
Scanlon shook his head again. I think you’re being foolish, he said. Unless you give up the painting, I’ll have to charge you. And you can’t win. You must see that you can’t win. All you’ll get is a bad scene and a sore heart. It won’t be a nice way to remember Miss Donatti.
He was surprising, that Scanlon. He was like an Irishman in a book, like a failed lawyer or a defrocked priest. I wondered whether he specialized in cases like this, quarrels over paintings or books or beds or chairs, to the point where he saw it all as a comedy. I felt a great temptation to tell him the whole story—Sheri’s offer of the apartment, the printing press behind the door, the dishes in the sink.
He didn’t try to hurry me. He waited as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned back with his feet on the desk and allowed me to imagine Sheri in the police station, sitting in the same chair I sat in now, her face tight with avant-garde indignation, telling Scanlon in her odd speech that I had stolen the painting.
How could she have done it? It was between us, a lover’s quarrel, yet she had