The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [98]
In a few minutes, he was asleep.
Nada gently removed the bottle from his hands and set it on the coffee table, already inscribed with the ghostly rings of old bottles and glasses, and walked through the first floor of the home. A dining room with a pool table. A dirty kitchen that smelled of curry. A small TV room that smelled like pot and patchouli. Eclectic furniture, as if merged from several different apartments. Eccentric colors on the walls. Lots of posters for Asian films and European bands. Garbage overflowed from trash cans.
I know who you are. Somewhere in her head Nada acknowledged that she had a certain amount of minor fame—from her father, from her card playing—but she was recognized almost never, especially outside of Las Vegas, so she could be in denial about it most of the time.
She considered going upstairs to look around, but going upstairs, even as a spy, was an intimate gesture. Nada didn’t want Jude to interpret it as an invitation. She could call a cab, but then the evening’s observations would have added to naught.
She was getting paid for this investigation, after all.
Back in the living room (or front room or parlor or whatever it must have been called back when this old house had been built), Burning Patrick struggled to breathe through a staccato snore. Nada tucked herself into a ball on the couch, finished her wine, and, with a switch of her toggle, fell into a sweaty sleep.
Now in the hall outside his bedroom, she wondered, Did Patrick carry me up the stairs to his room? Did he watch me sleep all night?
The wall to her right looked as if it had been untouched since the 1920s. Green paint peeled in places wallpaper didn’t. Baseboards abused by dogs. Old molding warped into arcs pulled long, thin nails from the plaster.
The opposite wall was covered by a mural. Dark and ominous tsunamis of black and red and brown and orange paint started in stripes by the stairs and built, layer upon layer, spilling into a violent collision across Burning Patrick’s door. Nada walked along the opposite side, the Victorian side, the better to see it, but also almost afraid to get too close.
“Up here,” came his voice.
She found stairs behind a closed door and climbed the painted wooden steps to the large attic, emerging into a surprising explosion of light. It was by far the sunniest room in the home, thanks to six large skylights cut into the roof. It was also the hottest, nearly as hot as outside. Burning Patrick squatted over a page of newspaper, his back to Nada, four inches of ass crack visible to her. Not only bright, the room was uncluttered. The floorboards were whitewashed. There were no chairs, no tables. Opened cans and jars with tears of paint spilling down their labels stood along one wall. Brushes of all kinds hung on a freestanding Peg-Board. A chest—a toy box almost—was filled with sponges and wire and other objects, dabbled with color. A ventilation fan was frozen impotently overhead. On the opposite wall, boxes and boxes of tile—in seconds, she counted eighty-seven—were stacked, many of them opened.
She approached him from behind and he stopped her, holding up a hand. She now saw three open cans of paint and a cardboard box for a mixing palette on the floor, a brush in his hand. His arm barely moved, dripping and dabbing and stroking paint onto a tile between his feet.
He made a noise that sounded like Wait.
When he was done, he stood and stared down at the tile, as if it were changing while he watched it, as if his mind could will the smallest adjustments without lowering his brush, which dripped forest green paint onto a newspaper opened on the floor. Two minutes, three minutes, four. In the silence, the ringing in her head took on volume. An interested gull landed on the skylight and watched from above. Patrick stepped away and over to a window that looked out onto the street and jerked his hand, indicating he wanted her to join him. “Look,” he said, pointing.
Across the street were three homes, two bungalows on either side of a house almost