When the Thrill Is Gone

38

There was the smell of French roast coffee in the air.

Sunlight gathered in the chiffon-yellow curtains, spraying its cool brilliance on the white bed. There were no paintings on the walls anywhere in the artist’s home. My watch, the only thing I wore, said 7:17.

I tapped the crystal face and smiled.

When I sat up I remembered the first bottle of wine. It was very good stuff.

My clothes were neatly folded on a straight-back ash chair two paces away. I stood up, fell back on the bed, stood up again, conquering the dizziness, and then got my pants and shirt on with hardly a wobble.

Chrystal’s kitchen was predominantly yellow. The sink was paved with slightly uneven lemon tiles and the floors were grapefruit linoleum with a smudge of green here and there. The walls and cabinets, the ceiling and table and chairs, were all painted the color of deep-yellow roses. The old-fashioned stove was yellow enamel with little blue gas jets cooking our breakfast.

All she wore was an oversized violet T-shirt.

I reached down through the neck, cupping her breast, as I kissed her neck. She returned the passion by pressing back against me.

“What’s for breakfast?” I whispered into her nimbus of hair.

“If you don’t move your hand it’s gonna be you in that chair over there.”

I kissed her again and moved back six inches or so.

She looked me up and down, took a deep breath through generous nostrils, and smiled.

“That was very nice last night,” she said. “Sometimes you need something and you don’t even know what it is.”

I sighed and nodded.

She gestured toward the chair that she’d recently threatened me with.

My eyes asked a question.

“Don’t worry,” she replied. “I’ll feed you first.”

I went quickly to the chair and she laughed.

“Whole wheat waffles, shirred eggs, and hickory-smoked bacon,” she said, and then went about making those words into reality.

She served me black coffee and offered hot milk, which I declined.

Watching her cook, I was silent. She didn’t hum, but that was about the only thing missing. I realized that I had fallen for my reluctant client when she smiled upon hearing Fatima’s voice. I was enamored by the love she felt for another.

“What?” she asked when I smiled at my flittery, yellow butterfly of a heart.

“Come sit,” I said.

She brought the breakfast on a butter-colored tray and served me.

I was experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of embarrassment.

After a few minutes of awkward silence she said, “Talk to me, Leonid McGill.”

“At first,” I said and then swallowed to get some moisture in my voice. “At first I was thinking that you should have some of your steel canvases on the walls. Then I saw that the rooms, the way they’re laid out and painted, are pieces of art in themselves.”

Chrystal smiled and I felt like a child who’d given his mother the right answer.

“I always knew that I was going to be an artist,” she said, reaching across the table to touch my hand. “And not any watercolorist or etcher, either. I was going to work hard, and with dangerous materials. I was going to make what was hard soft and what was soft impenetrable.”

“You thought these things when you were a kid?”

“I didn’t have the words back then but the ideas haven’t changed since I was four years old.

“I didn’t marry Cyril because he was rich,” she said. “It was because when I came to his house the first time I saw the long hall that led to his office and told him I wanted to paint it hot pink. I said that if he let me do that to his house, then he could do whatever he wanted with me.”

“That’s why you married him? Because he let you paint two walls?”

“After we finished fucking, we talked... for hours. I didn’t like the sex, but he was able to talk without competition, and to love without lust or dominance.”

Our eyes met with these last words and I wavered. This also was a new feeling. It made me wonder at something I might have missed, some kind of violation and settlement in a relationship that I had not previously experienced.

“Cyril told me that he believes that he has a power, a cursing power that operates without his volition,” she said. “His psychic, a man named Marlowe, had apparently confirmed this as a fact, and even though I don’t believe in that stuff — his wives are still dead.”

My mind was wandering down that long pink hallway. I wanted to linger there for a while to comprehend the meaning she imparted.

But I had a job to do.

“So you think he killed them?” I asked.

“I think he thinks he did, and I’m an artist — my whole life is imagination.”

“Shawna told me that Cyril has moved to another bedroom and talks all night to a woman on the phone.”

“He’s always had his own bedroom,” she said. “Our sex life was never the center of the relationship. But he has been distant, and he did talk on the phone late at night. He lost weight and sometimes went away for weeks at a time.”

“And is that why you came here?”

“I sold the necklace and went away. I told Cyril that I thought he was turning sour on me and that I didn’t want to go the ways of his previous wives.”

“What he say to that?”

“He swore that he wasn’t upset with me and he just wanted a few months to get his mind straight. I told him fine, and that I’d call him in the fall.”

“Was he okay with that?”

She hunched her shoulders and came over to straddle my lap.

I kissed her and asked, “But then why did you send Shawna to me?”

“I didn’t.” She shook her head and I kissed her.

“What sense does it make for her to come to me on her own? And who would kill her?”

“Maybe she went directly to Cyril,” Chrystal speculated.

“And you think that he’s capable of murdering her?”

She stood up and went back to her chair, making me want to stop talking about the case at all.

“I don’t know,” she said after a long, thoughtful pause. “I’ve never been afraid of Cyril. I feel the violence that formed him, but it never seemed to have motility.”

Her use of this last word shocked me. I was made suddenly aware of the complexity of Chrystal. She was the odd combination of the hood and a postdoctoral student, of a merchant marine and a woman who lives in perfect equanimity as long as no one brings a hot color into her line of sight.

“You say ‘the violence that formed him’?”

“His father was a brute,” Chrystal said. “He beat him and his brothers, and his mother, too. The only way that Cy could get back at his father was to pretend, in his mind, to have killed him.”

“How does the inheritance play out?” I asked.

“I made him do a prenuptial agreement separating our monies before we were married, but on our fourth anniversary he tore up his copy of the agreement. He said that he loved me and trusted me.”

“Seven years, right?” I said, referring to the length of their marriage.

She nodded.

“He hired me to give you a message,” I said.

“What?”

“‘I love you and would never be upset about anything having to do with your actions or oversights.’”

The inept wording brought an ever-so-slight smile to Chrystal’s lips.

“I have to ask you something,” I said.

“Will it keep me from climbing up on you again?”

“Probably.”

“That’s a talent,” she said. “It’s harder to turn a woman off, you know.”

“You don’t seem shocked about the possibility of Shawna’s death.”

“You’re a talented man, Mr. McGill.”

“What was it about Shawna?” I asked.

“Is she really dead?”

“I think so.”

Chrystal took a moment to ponder the lifelong relationship between herself and the woman her mother called a wild creature.

“Instead of working with steel, my sister wrought art on her own body and mind,” the postdoctoral ghetto sailor proclaimed. “She made babies and enemies and never took the easy way, not once in her life. I loved her but I’m not surprised if she’s dead.”

I nodded because there was nothing to say about the artist’s sober view of life, love, and death.

“I’ll take the train back this morning,” I said. “The kids will be with you by tonight.”

“No,” she said. “If Shawnie’s dead, then I need to find her and bury her and take Fatima and them someplace safe.”

“You’re probably safer away from New York.”

“Maybe, but I’m not worried about that,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I have you, don’t I?”