The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [27]
Returning to the room where Krahe is waiting, I pause in the doorway. I have taken another route back to the table and Kurt is staring at the place where he thinks I will appear. It seems a bit underhanded to watch him as he watches for me, but I do anyway. He is not talking on his cell phone, which actually gets a signal high on this hill. He is not even looking at the woman at the next table, who is beautiful. He’s not drinking wine or fiddling with his napkin. He is just waiting. Waiting for me. And the way he is sitting there, unaware and waiting for me, strikes me. Perhaps this is the last moment in my life I will be truly appreciated by a man. I stand there and take it in.
When finally he rises, anxious, I propel myself into the room. He doesn’t say “Where were you?” and I don’t make an excuse. We sit down slowly at either side of the table and proceed to order and then eat our food—everything is either tasteless or too rich. We speak about small things with calm detachment. I marvel at this. You would not think we ever slept together. You would not think he pulled my hair until tears filled my eyes or that I bit him so hard I drew blood. You would not think that sometimes we have gone so far into sex that we could not get out, that sex kept driving us, hurting us. You would not think we have looked into each other’s eyes, boundlessly at peace, or that we’d ever lain naked in the raining woods and laughed ourselves sick. I know he is on the brink of asking what is this the way people do, but I will not allow him to speak. So we talk about the rocks, the ravens, the trees, and all of the little things that happen on our road.
I’m home before eleven, like a good teen on a demure date. The light is on in the first-floor living room, where Elsie likes to sit and listen to music. She has Satie on. The master of punctuation. When I walk into the room she stiffens in her chair, casts her gaze upon me, and says, in that parental voice even grown children dread to hear, “Sit down, we have something to talk about.”
“Can it wait?” It must be that she has seen the drum, and although I know it is inevitable, I really don’t want to talk about it tonight.
Elsie stares at me, trying not to blink. The music has become the backdrop to a suspense movie. All jagged exclamation points. I turn it off and sit down across from her. She is wearing an old pink chenille bathrobe and elegant turquoise earrings.
“You left these in.” I tap my earlobes.
“On purpose,” she says.
“Oh?”
She pauses in an ominous way before she speaks. “Years ago, I nearly stole these earrings from a client.”
I turn away and busy myself examining the folds and stitches of one of her more complex afghans. She continues.
“I was very tempted. I happened to have recognized the earrings from a little-known Curtis photograph. It wasn’t that the earrings are so valuable, but that they’d lain close to the girl’s neck, the subject, and if I had them it seemed, I felt, as though I was part of his work too.”
“I took the drum for similar reasons.”
“Oh, no doubt.” Her voice is dry. After an empty pause, she prompts, “When are you planning to return it?”
“I’m not.”
She throws her hands up, lets them fall to her knees and hang down, limp rags of dismay.
“It would look odd if I just brought it back now. No one knows it’s missing.”
“Nonsense. You could say you had it repaired.”
“Well, I