After a day or two of trying to interest Frank in some fun activity like running round in the yard brandishing his plastic machete or giving me yet another tour of his gallery or watching Casablanca for the fifty billionth time, I gave in and sat on the lip of platform beside him, legs dangling and chin propped. Frank took my hand and said, “This is the disappointing part I tried to warn you about.” After that, we sat there holding hands for I don’t know how long.
Something about the two of us sitting there like that reminded me of my mother keeping me company on the stoop the summer after my father left. I hadn’t thought about that in years. I can hardly remember what he looked like, which seems wrong, since I wasn’t all that little when he abandoned us. My mother had given me a box of photographs of him that I’d misplaced somehow, so there was that. But I think the real reason I lost his face was that I imagined every man who set foot on our block would turn out to be my dad. Over time all those faces that weren’t his gradually wiped out the memory of the face that was.
I started drawing pictures to keep busy. But as time went on I found myself taking a pretty big slice of my identity from the fact that I was incredibly awesome at drawing horses and bulldogs, two animals seen on my block about as often as my father. “It’s all in the ears,” I would explain to my grade-school fan base when they pumped me for my secrets. “They’re triangles.” Solemn nods all around.
That mediocre knack plus my excellent grades and economic hardship got me a full ride at Nebraska. But I had no illusions about my artistic talent and more or less gave up painting when I moved to New York. The materials were messy and expensive. Also volatile and smelly, which didn’t make me a popular tenant. I switched to doing pencil sketches and charcoal caricatures of tourists in Central Park, thinking maybe I could make some money doing that. But horses and dogs were far easier clients to satisfy and I quit the park after a few months. Art was for trust-funders, the truly talented, and deluded souls who thought they were. I had to make a living. But not as an accountant. I know it would be the sensible thing to do. But please, not just yet.
The last drawing I’d done was of Mr. Vargas’s daughter Carolyn. I wanted to give him some kind of thank-you gift for my new job-not-in-accounting. I nabbed a snapshot from his desk, photocopied it, and worked from that. Drawing that way is kind of a cheat, since life’s three-dimensional angles and shadows are frozen in time and two dimensions for you. But if he were half as pleased as my mother pretended to be when I gave her yet another drawing of the pony I’d never have, that would be fine with me.
I thought my portrait turned out well so I put it in a little frame. Mr. Vargas thanked me effusively but I couldn’t help noticing that it disappeared from his desk right away. The last time I went to visit Mrs. Vargas in the hospital, though, I saw my drawing of Carolyn on her bedside table alongside a photograph of the freshly minted Mr. and Mrs. Vargas on their wedding day twenty years before. I am not the sort of person who cries in hospital rooms but I came very close to doing it then. My art might not be good for much, but I guess it was good for something.
So the next afternoon when Frank and I reported for our Dream House vigil I came armed with a pencil and blank index cards. I sat at the yellow table churning out sketch after sketch of the kid in all his favorite outfits, which pleased him even more than I imagined it would. He got up and went to work in his gallery again, arranging and rearranging my drawings on the wall to form a narrative only he understood well enough to discuss with himself.
After that, it was only a matter of time until Frank had the bright idea of dragging out one of the big blank canvases in the atelier rack so I could cough out a portrait for him to give his mother for Christmas. This was his pitch: “What do you give the woman who has everything but money and living room furniture?”
“A coffee table?”
“My mother doesn’t drink coffee. Also, coffee tables are a menace.”
“A menace? Says who?”
“Says William Holden. Or he might have if he had survived his deadly encounter with a coffee table on November twelfth, 1981. What my mother needs is a portrait of me to hang over the mantel.”
“Except I’m not a very good painter,” I said.
“She won’t care. My mother is fond of looking at pictures of me no matter how meritless they are. She keeps a box full of particularly embarrassing photographs from my childhood under her bed. Me in diapers or strapped in my high chair with baby food in my hair or asleep in a position which, based on posterior elevation in relation to the angle of neck and the squash of face against pillow, she calls ‘ass over teakettle.’ I imagine that getting down on her knees to pull that box out must hurt a great deal because more than once I have seen her crying while looking at those pictures. That’s why I think it will be such a good idea for her to have a large painting of me up high where she can see it without having to overtax her joints. I am willing to offer you this commission because you are on the payroll already and I have no money to hire anybody else.” He turned out his pockets to illustrate their emptiness. “Also you have nothing else to do all day while I am at school so you might as well.”