Don't I Know You? (15 page)

“I didn't say yes,” Agnes said coldly, referring to Rose's letters. “I didn't say anything at all.”

“I know. I decided to take a chance and come anyway. Sooner or later the story about the two of you is going to get out there, after the Winn-Dixie photo. Better my paper than the British tabs, perhaps.”

Agnes and Jimi exchanged a sorrowful look.

The two of them had just finished a meal and were drinking mescal from thumb-sized clay cups as the last smudge of mauve faded in the sky. One wall of the room was entirely glass. Jimi lit a line of votive candles at the bottom of it and poured some mescal for Rose. They were sorry to see her, they explained, but since she was here, she could sleep in the paint shed and they would talk in the morning. The cot was made up, and there was a chamber pot underneath.

Then they both stood.

“Good night, Ms. McEwan,” Agnes said. “We get up at six a.m.”

*   *   *

The altitude gave her dreams, mostly anxious scenes involving airport lineups and slamming taxi doors. She dreamed that she and Eric were still together, going somewhere in a car, and between them on the seat was the rodent-skull door knocker. Rose was flipping through the CD wallet as Eric drove and the road unspooled ahead. She played some old Bob Marley and things felt all right between them. Then a rooster crowed, a real rooster. She woke up shivering with one sheet wrapped around her in a room full of paint tins, dog food, and garden tools.

She took a jacket out of her suitcase, and in the pocket was the letter from Eric, still unopened. Her address on the front in gold print. Probably the invitation; her stepson and daughter had already received theirs.

When the sky began to lighten she got up and went outside. A white El Dorado she hadn't noticed the night before was parked in the yard, like a big grazing animal. A dog asleep on a nest of blankets whumped its tail but did not stir. She looked at the horizon, an undulating line of soft mountains, like ground-down molars—nothing like the straight lines of Martin's paintings. Rose felt her gaze moving out and out, a neglected muscle stretching.

At the end of the yard was another adobe structure, with a skylight. She peered through the windows. There on scaffoldings and easels were Martin's paintings. With a trespasser's glance toward the house, Rose pushed the door open and stepped inside. There was something erotic about entering rooms like these, where private people did their work.

A large canvas stood on a table against one wall. A third of it was covered with faint horizontal pencil lines under a wash of yellow. These paintings about nothing, Rose realized, apparently made of nothing, still had to cross the line between half-imagined and finished. Despite its emptiness the canvas still gave the impression of being cluttered.

Rose went over to a stack of paintings in the corner and flipped through them like record albums in a rack. Gray, gray, blue, cream. Fields of color, they revealed little. Perhaps she was too close to them, too greedy for their meaning. It was like peering into the folds of a brain to find the location of a particular memory.

“That is old work,” said Agnes, blotting out the light at the door. “I use the canvas backs for sketching.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't want to disturb you.”

“Well, there are no secrets here anyway. It is all simply looking and doing, and looking again.”

“This one—can you tell me about it?” Rose flipped to the half-finished canvas.

“There is nothing to tell,” Agnes said, waving the question away. She was wearing a man's blue denim shirt and a long Mexican-looking skirt with embroidery along the hem.

“But I don't associate you with yellow.”

Agnes went over to the splayed canvases and shut them like a book.

“I often begin with yellow. That is a secret, I suppose.”

“Do you paint directly from the landscape, or do you use photographs?”

“Jimi and I may drive up into the hills and I will either paint or sketch. I sometimes draw the mountains, work on the rest, then take away the mountains altogether. Only light interests me in the end.”

Behind the door was a small canvas distinct from the others, painted in thick strokes of black, purple, and white. It seemed to represent two swirling figures. Rose went over to it and held it up.

“That one is Jimi's,” Agnes said.

“Of the two of you?”

“Yes. I'm fond of it. James could paint, if he chose to.”

“Well, he's quite accomplished as it is.”

“Yes. I wish he thought so.”

“He doesn't?”

“No. All that media nonsense overtook him near the end and he tends to dwell on that.” A rooster crowed again from the yard.

“But he likes to cook,” she said, walking out of the studio, “and breakfast must be ready.” Rose followed her. The dog came up and sniffed Martin's skirt. It was seven a.m. and already hot.

*   *   *

After breakfast the three of them took the El Dorado into town for supplies—eggs, bread, mineral spirits, more mescal and wine, and many small hot peppers. The shopkeepers greeted Jimi by name and gave Rose a warning look that said
Yes, he's safe with us
. Then they drove up into the hills, left the main road, and turned onto a trail of two hard-baked ruts. “We're going to do some work,” they said.

The sky there seemed to behave like a lens that overfocused everything; Rose found the effect almost hallucinatory. She sat in the back (like a dog, she felt, although not unhappily) and said nothing. Jimi drove. Agnes was beside him, wearing a fisherman's canvas hat. Jimi played a CD—“Caldonia” by Louis Armstrong. He sang along with it, his frayed, slouchy voice full of space like Armstrong's.

Caldonia—Caldonia—why won't you be mine …

Utterly absorbed, Agnes looked out her window at—what? Rose saw only empty sky and featureless desert. Her eyes wanted to close.

They came to a stony, gently ascending riverbed and turned into it.

“Our cobbled road,” Agnes said with a rare smile.

The riverbed took them up to a flat, high pinnacle of land—a mesa—where they stopped. Silence, and suffocating heat. Agnes looked pleased and put her hand on Jimi's arm. Rose got out of the car and stood looking at the 360-degree view. It made her dizzy, as if the horizon far away were the lip of a great waterfall. The light was merciless, the heat pressed upon them, and Rose felt a stirring of panic. There was nowhere to shelter here, only this old car and this strange couple. For a moment she wondered if she were still asleep on the plane and dreaming. Sometimes being a reporter felt like being a criminal on the lam.

“If you look carefully you can see the ranch,” Agnes said, pointing. Rose squinted and saw nothing.

“Ah yes,” she said.

“Did you bring the hard-boiled eggs, James?” Agnes said. “I'm hungry.”

Agnes erected a folding easel and put a small canvas on it. She snapped open an old-fashioned doctor's satchel and began to take out pencils, brushes, and crumpled tubes of paint. Jimi came back from the car with a cloth-covered basket and a saltshaker.

“Have you ever seen anything like the color of that yolk?” Agnes said, holding out the shelled egg she had just bitten into. “But nothing I could work with.”

Rose wandered about, feeling disoriented. She put one of Agnes's clean paint rags under her hat to protect her neck from the sun. She was used to being rooted in her mind, on the screen and in her sentences. This was too much.

“Play for us, Jimi,” Agnes commanded. He had taken out his guitar, a nail-polish-red Gibson Les Paul. Unamplified, the guitar sounded loose and tinny, like music coming from another room. He sang “Little Red House” in a smoky absentminded way, humming through some of the lyrics as Agnes stood at her easel with a pencil, her head moving from horizon to canvas and back again.

As she sat on top of the cooler listening to Jimi Hendrix sing, Rose felt she really should be making notes. This story would be big. She took out a notebook and uncapped her pen. “V. hot,” she wrote. “Little Red House.” Then she closed the notebook and lay down on the ground, draping the cloth from the egg basket over her face. She listened.

Jimi's voice, pitched a bit lower than in the old days, was so all of him, all at once, in every note. Like the bluest of blue on a canvas. Like a true pencil line. Rose lay there remembering the first time, long ago, she had heard that backward-sounding song “Manic Depression.” She was in the bed of a man she hardly knew. Kevin? Kevin something. He was drunk and playing all his Janis Joplin and Hendrix records for her, letting the needle fall too hard. Then they had sex and fell asleep. A not so unusual night in those days. But the off-kilter surge of “Manic Depression,” its churning plea, and the nakedness of Jimi's voice had made Rose get up out of Kevin's bed (carefully, so as not to wake him) and walk back home alone.

It was time to be truer to herself, she'd decided.

Under the cloth Rose inhaled the smell of the eggs and a lingering scent of bread. She began to relax, feeling the hard ground under her hips and shoulders. Agnes was making chicken-scratching sounds on the canvas with her pencil. Occasionally she would carve away at the angle of the tip with a penknife. Jimi noodled around on the guitar, making up a song about their rooster, Fidel.

To be inside art, not outside thinking about it. Rose had forgotten how it felt. Journalism did not work like that.

As Jimi played, unexpected images came into Rose's mind, like animals at dusk appearing at a water hole. An image of Eric wading into the lake at the cottage, hugging himself and shivering. The look on his face coming down the hospital corridor the night Ryan had walked through a glass door and cut himself badly. She couldn't reach him on the phone, and when he showed up hours later, he wouldn't say where he had been. That was the point at which she knew, but refused to believe it.

Then up rose another image of someone she worked with, a man with long sideburns and sleeves rolled tightly above his elbows as he pattered away on his keyboard. Rolf. This bland colleague sat in Rose's line of vision for most of the working day. Part of her landscape.

Sometimes her job was not to see.

“
My cherie amour
,” Jimi was singing, “
lovely as a summer day
…” This brought a twitch of a smile to the corners of Agnes's mouth. Her eyes kept flicking rapidly from horizon to canvas like a hummingbird that sips at a feeder, retreats, then darts back.

“Oh, it's wrong now,” she said, stepping back and letting her painting arm drop. “You distracted me, James.”

Hendrix put down his guitar, went over to Agnes, and wrapped his arms around her as he studied the canvas. Rose lifted the cloth off her face to observe them.

“It's fine, Ag. Just thin it out.”

“It will show.” She pouted like a girl.

“It won't. Keep going—this part is fine.” He pointed to one corner of the canvas, a curdled white like cirrus clouds.

“Yes, that part is good.”

“Go on.”

“Play something different,” Agnes instructed, already twirling her paintbrush in a rosette of paint on the metal cookie sheet she used as a palette.

“You start. I have to take a piss.” Jimi ambled over to the other side of the car, out of sight.

“Paintings are jealous,” Agnes said to Rose. “The moment I feel the tiniest bit of satisfaction with one, the painting immediately senses it and misbehaves.”

“Is it like a sense of smell, that you lose the freshness of your vision after a while?”

“Yes. The first strokes are crucial. They come directly from the eye, not the brain.”

Jimi came back over, jingling the car keys. “Let me show you something while she works,” he said. “Cherie, we're going to the hoodoos.” Agnes didn't turn her head.

They drove back down the riverbed to a point where it forked, and followed another branch. The banks deepened until they were inside a narrow, shallow canyon. I really ought be asking him questions, Rose thought. After all, this was prime time—alone in a canyon with the world's most legendary guitarist. Who had not died of an overdose after all. But she hated to break their companionable silence and the road required all of Jimi's attention. Rose looked at his hands on the wheel, studying the four or five rings he wore. One was a Victorian cameo, a woman's ivory face in profile. Another was a fang-shaped object, a bone or a bit of tusk.

“It looks like ivory,” said Jimi, who had caught her glance, “but it's made from a hoof. Agnes had an old horse she didn't want to part with. When he died, she carved his hooves into birds and spoons, and this ring.”

“I didn't know she made other things.”

“She likes to sew my shirts too.”

With a familiar feeling of power and illicitness, Rose began to turn the conversation in the direction she needed it to go.

“You two seem to get along very well.”

“Yes, now. But not at first. She'd been living alone for a long time when I showed up.”

All the windows were open and the cool air on Rose's arm felt good. She got her notebook out of her bag, and saw the unopened letter from Eric. But maybe it wasn't the invitation after all. Maybe it was a note, a drunken midnight note saying “Wedding off—please call!”

“Can I ask how you came to be together?” she asked Jimi.

He said nothing as he pulled off the road and stopped. Huddled before them was a forest of round, red dirt columns, a few twenty feet high, sculpted by the wind. Some resembled whirling Sufi dancers, cylindrical shapes that tapered at the bottom and fanned out ecstatically in the middle, then narrowed again. Others looked off-center, like half-thrown pots on a potter's wheel, mouths wobbling out of plumb.

“These are the hoodoos. It's supposed to be sacred ground—the Hopi have ceremonies here.”