Читать книгу The Women's Club - Abusive partners are winding up dead… Criminals who target women are the victims of nasty accidents… Pretend it's not happening, you might live longer - Michael Crawley - Страница 13

Lisa’s face and hands were smeared red. The same red, freshly squeezed from the tube, began to trickle down the centre of the huge canvas.

‘Oh no you don’t!’

Lisa attacked, dragging the blob of paint across the canvas with her left hand, following with the coarse brush in her right. Two-fisted painting! She was in the zone!

Garth Brooks’ ‘I Got Friends in Low Places’ blared from her radio. Usually, she painted to classical but when she was down to the wire, as she was now with only days before her first one- woman show, she switched to country. Why? She didn’t know. The music had humour, that was one thing. Perhaps it simply inspired her to finish the work in progress so she could turn the damn stuff off.

She laughed, giddy, and not just from inhaling paint thinners, though God knows she’d done enough of that lately. All her life she’d wanted this, just this, the freedom to paint and someone with influence, a gallery owner, a New York City gallery owner, to take a chance on her work. She’d had setbacks aplenty, the biggest being her unfortunate marriage and the amazing way that bearing and raising a child turned a woman’s attention away from everything but that – the child.

Lisa swallowed a lump in her throat. She wouldn’t dwell on Davey, not now. He was safe, living with his father in a big house on the Upper East Side. He was better off living with his dad, she was sure, though it’d torn her heart in two to give up custody when the inevitable divorce finally set her free.

Anyway, this painting, this show, was for Davey too. To prove to him she wasn’t the bum her ex, Todd, said she was. She was an artist. Always had been. She should never have married, become domestic, probably shouldn’t have had a child, though that she did not, could not, regret.

‘I can’t make you love me if you don’t,’ she warbled along with the new melody that crooned from the radio. ‘Boo-Hoo baby,’ she ad-libbed. Her brush dabbed at the canvas.

The work was strong, striking, unique. It was all hers. No longer derivative or tentative, or any of the crap that that bastard critic had labelled it with in his review of the joint show she’d participated in last year.

Good God, how she hated him. Binky Caruthers, faux upper crust Englishman and even more faux art critic. ‘Binky,’ she snarled. ‘Take that!’ Another violent stab at the red smear. She’d never known she could hate as purely as she did now. Her ex, of course, but also – Binky Caruthers.

He’d dogged her from her very first piece in her very first collective show. One little water- colour in a show of fifty, and he’d singled it out for his most scathing criticism. As if he’d known how easy it would be to destroy her confidence. She’d cried for a week. Just like Bonnie Raitt on the radio, buckets of tears, oh yeah.

Life had been hard, no doubt about it: the divorce, the threats from her ex, the tears of her son. Finding this loft, with enough sunlight for her to do her work, yet in an area of New York that was safe enough for Davey to visit. Financing herself, largely, since the deal she’d struck with Todd to buy her freedom had been crap. ‘It’s all about Davey, now,’ he’d said, donning the Good Dad Hat as easily as he’d donned and discarded a dozen others. ‘I can’t afford to support you and Davey if you insist on going ahead with it.’

Well, she had insisted. She was a survivor of marriage, and all the stronger for it. She’d survived Binky Caruthers, too. He’d continued singling her out wherever he spotted her work, mixing his metaphors gleefully, alliterating wildly. ‘Lisa Lerner’s latest ludicrosity made me lose my lunch.’

Lisa shivered. Abruptly, she dropped the paintbrush. Suddenly, the piece was done.

She cranked the knob on her paint-caked radio to ‘off’. She was ready to begin crating the older pieces while this one dried. It amazed her, always, that one moment she was still finishing a piece and then, as if by magic, the piece screamed, ‘No more,’ and thank God she heard it and stopped. It could be called ‘My Hate for Binky’, but that would be a mistake, so she’d just call it ‘Revenge is Sweet’.

The telephone rang. She wiped her hands on her smock, not so much to prevent paint from transferring to the receiver – which, like the radio and pretty much everything else in this section of the loft was already decorated with layers of flaking colour – but to keep from sticking to it.

‘Hello?’

‘Lisa, it’s Marieka.’

‘Hey, great timing! I’ve finished that last big piece, the one I was telling you about? Time to start crating.’

‘I thought it might be, which is why I’m calling instead of coming by in person. There’s a bit of a glitch with the show.’

‘How so?’ Her voice remained steady, though her heart had dropped from her chest to deep in her belly and lay there, thudding laboriously, in the wrong, wrong place.

‘I’m not exactly sure what happened, although I have my suspicions. But I just got off the horn with Andrea’s Art House and she says she has to cancel. For reasons of, get this, safety.’

‘S – safety?’

‘Andrea’s has been threatened.’

‘Threatened?’ Lisa’s echolalia, a condition she’d suffered from as a child and that returned when she was extremely stressed, made it impossible to do more than repeat what she heard. Marieka would understand that, though. Marieka was more than an agent, she was a friend.

‘Apparently she’s received an anonymous threat. Actual letters cut from magazines and pasted on paper, like you see in the movies.’

‘Cut and paste?’

‘Lisa?’

‘Lisa.’

‘I’m coming over. Now.’ Marieka’s words were more than definite. They were definitive.

Lisa couldn’t look at her work. It was zero. She was a zero. Thank God Davey was with his father. Todd. Had he sent the anonymous letter? Did he hate her that much? A soft moan escaped her lips. Her eyes travelled to her work station. The box cutter gleamed among her dull brushes. The bright blue handle was thick and sturdy, not a twig like her sable-tipped brush handles. Art. What a laugh.

She’d tried ending it before when she’d been at university in Boston: pills once, and another time, the time that had almost worked, she’d just wandered away from the campus, across a field, in a magnificent snowstorm. When she’d grown tired of walking, her fingertips and toes numb, the tip of her nose, too, she’d lain down and let the softly falling snow cover her like a blanket. That attempt might’ve been the end of her had she not been discovered by some outdoorsy types on snowshoes. She’d almost lost a digit or two, but she’d been ‘lucky’. Lucky to be alive?

By the time Marieka arrived, Lisa was tucked into a dark corner of the loft, trying to be as small as the zero she knew she was. Marieka let herself in with her keys. Lisa could hear her calling her name, but all she could do in response was mewl, like a wounded kitten.

One of these days Marieka would get tired of rescuing her, and then what? She’d never encounter a snowstorm again, ever, not one that was as big and strong as the one she’d almost died in.

She stayed away from pills on purpose. But there was always the box cutter.

Lisa let Marieka make tea and bundle her up in a blanket. She felt the hot liquid warm her blood, which in turn warmed her bones. She was lucky. Lucky to be alive.