“Maybe that lucky omen brought me that high portrait fee.”
“That would be nice if it did,” he laughed. “You know the English expression ‘a blessing in disguise’?”
“Languages aren’t my strong suit.”
“A camouflaged blessing. A blessing that’s changed appearance. At first glance it seems unfortunate, but it turns out to bring you happiness. There are things that should be the opposite, too, of course. In theory.”
In theory, I repeated to myself.
“Better keep your eyes open,” he said.
“Will do,” I said.
* * *
—
At one thirty the next day she came to see me, and as always we headed straight for bed. While we had sex we hardly said a word. It was raining that afternoon, an unusually heavy shower for autumn, more like a midsummer downpour. Heavy raindrops, carried on the wind, rapped against the window, and I think there were a few flashes of lightning, too. A thick bank of dark clouds passed over the valley, and when the rain let up, the mountains had taken on a darker hue. Flocks of birds that had taken shelter from the rain somewhere now twittered back and were busily hunting down insects. Right after rain was the perfect lunchtime for them. The sun shone from breaks in the clouds, making the raindrops on all the tree branches sparkle. While it had been raining we were deep into making love, and I had barely given the falling rain a second thought. And just as we were finishing, the rain abruptly stopped. Almost as if it were waiting for us.
We lay naked in bed, wrapped in a thin bedcover, talking. Mostly we talked about the grades her two daughters were getting in school. The older girl was good at school and had very good grades. She was a placid child who never caused any trouble. The younger daughter, in contrast, hated to study and would never settle down at her desk to do homework. But she was cheerful and upbeat, and quite good-looking as well. Self-assured, popular, good at sports. Maybe we should give up on having her do well at school, her mother said, and let her go into the entertainment field? I’m thinking of eventually putting her into one of those schools that train child entertainers, she said.
If you think about it, it was kind of strange. I was lying there next to a woman I’d known for only about three months, listening to her talk about her daughters, whom I’d never laid eyes on. She was even asking me my opinion on what sort of path they should take in life. And the two of us there, without a stitch on. Admittedly, though, not a bad feeling, to take a random peek into the lives of people I hardly knew. Brushing past the lives of people I would never have anything to do with. Their lives felt right before me, yet also far away. As she talked, the woman toyed with my now flaccid penis, which was slowly coming back to life.
“Have you been painting anything these days?” she asked.
“Not really,” I answered honestly.
“No creative urge welling up?”
I hesitated. “…Well, tomorrow I have to start on a commission I got.”
“You’re going to paint on commission?”
“That’s right. Have to earn some money sometimes.”
“What sort of commission?”
“A portrait.”
“Is it, by any chance, a portrait of that person you mentioned on the phone yesterday, Mr. Menshiki?”
“It is,” I said. She was so sharp at times it took me by surprise.
“And you want to know something about this Mr. Menshiki, right?”
“At this point he’s a mystery. I met him once and we talked, but I still have no idea what sort of person he is. I like to know what kind of person I’m going to paint.”
“You should just ask him directly.”
“He might not give me a straight answer,” I said. “He might only tell me what he wants me to know.”
“I could look into it for you,” she said.
“You can do that?”
“I might have an idea.”
“There were zero hits on him on the Internet.”
“The Internet doesn’t work well in the jungle,” she said. “The jungle has its own communications network. Signaling with drums, tying a message around a monkey’s neck.”
“I don’t know much about the jungle, I’m afraid.”
“When civilization’s devices don’t operate, it’s worth trying drums or a monkey.”
My penis had now grown fully erect under her soft, busy fingers. She skillfully and greedily began to use her lips and tongue, and a meaningful silence descended upon us for a while. As the birds outside chirped and went about the work of making a living, the two of us began a second round of sex.
* * *
—
After our long second bout of lovemaking, punctuated by an intermission, we climbed out of bed, lazily gathered our clothes from the floor, and dressed. We went out to the terrace and, sipping hot herb tea, gazed across the valley at the large white concrete house there. We sat side by side on the weathered wooden deck chairs and breathed in deeply the fresh dampness of the mountain air. Through the woods to the southwest was a small patch of sparkling ocean, a mere fragment of the enormous Pacific. The mountain slopes around were already dyed with autumn colors, minute gradations of yellow and red, with an intrusion of green from the clumps of evergreens. The mix of these vivid colors made the white concrete of Menshiki’s house stand out all the more. It was an almost obsessive white that looked like it would never be dirtied or treated with contempt by such things as wind, rain, dust, or even time itself. White is a color, too, I thought distractedly. Definitely not the lack of color. We sat there on the lounge chairs for a long time without saying a word, silence an entirely natural companion.
“Mr. Menshiki in his white mansion,” she said after a while. “Sounds like the beginning of an amusing fairy tale.”
But what awaited me was, of course, not some “amusing fairy tale.” Or a blessing in disguise, either. But by the time that became clear to me, there was no turning back.
9
EXCHANGING FRAGMENTS WITH EACH OTHER
On Friday at one thirty Menshiki appeared in the same Jaguar. The deep roar of the engine as it climbed the steep slope grew louder as it approached, and finally came to a stop in front of the house. As before, he shut the door of the car with the same solid sound, and removed his sunglasses and slipped them into the breast pocket of his jacket. An exact repeat of the previous visit. This time, though, he wore a white polo shirt with a blue-gray cotton jacket, cream-colored chinos, and brown leather shoes. He was so impeccably dressed that he could have been a model in a magazine, though he didn’t give the impression that it was all too perfect. It looked casual, and naturally neat. And that abundant white hair of his was, like the walls of his mansion, a pure, unadulterated white. Just as I had the first time, I watched him approach through a gap in the curtains.
The front doorbell rang and I opened it and let him in. This time he didn’t hold his hand out to shake mine. He just looked me in the eye, and gave a small smile and a brief nod of greeting. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d been a bit anxious that every time we met I’d have to go through one of his firm handshakes. Once again, I showed him into the living room and had him sit on the sofa. And brought out two cups of freshly brewed coffee from the kitchen.
“I didn’t know what I should wear,” he said, sounding apologetic. “Is this outfit all right?”
“It doesn’t matter at this point. We can decide at the end how you should be dressed. A suit, or shorts and sandals, we can adjust the clothes later on however we want.”
Or show you holding a Starbucks cup, I added to myself.
“Knowing you’re going to be modeling makes you anxious. I know I won’t have to take off all my clothes, but it still makes me feel like I’m being stripped down.”