Painting With Fire (4 page)

Chapter
6: A Close Stranger

Claudia hated being interrogated about Tom. There were just too many questions she didn’t know the answer to. She didn’t know anything about his childhood. She didn’t know anything about where he was from. And she didn’t know what he was doing the night Steve Jackson died. Sure, he said he was sleeping, but how could she know for sure?

She scrubbed the dishes from her baking spree with a kind of violence. She scraped steel wool against aluminum with the murky
, lukewarm water lapping at her hands.

She
never asked him many questions. He had a way of clamming up. He would literally get up and go into his room and lock the door. Sometimes, he’d paint. Sometimes, he’d just stew. Sometimes it had to do with her, but most of the time he just seemed to be stewing in his own bad memories, judging by his scowl.

She never had the heart
or gut
s
to ask him again where he was that night, but she always wondered about it. She had gone to bed by 11 that night. He asked her if she had heard anything.

“No,” she said. “I’m a deep sleeper.”

And that had been the end of the conversation. He never volunteered anything more. It was typical of him to shut up like that when she had a million questions racing through her mind.

Maybe it was time they parted ways. They had started out as temporary roommates and never meant to live together permanently.
Maybe it was time to move back in with mom. She shuddered. No, she’d rather die.

Her friends always asked her why she didn’t date him.
She liked him, but it would have made things too complicated. Claudia had a bad track record when it came to love. She had never been able to be friends with an ex. The good and bad feelings just had a strange way of hanging on forever. She couldn’t afford to get confused right now. She couldn’t afford to complicate things when she depended on him so much.

He was not bad looking with that
strong jaw, those dark eyes, a golden complexion and a daily pushup habit that showed when he was shirtless coming out of the shower. A lot of women liked him, until they realized he was a lost dreamer with very little money. That didn’t matter to her.

What did matter was that she had a safe place to stay with a decent roommate.
She didn’t want to move back in with her mother. Claudia scrubbed the dishes harder just thinking about the prospect. It was always possible, but it wasn’t ideal. The bills were piling up. No, she’d go bankrupt before she walked back into that house. Meanwhile, Tom was paying the phone bill and the electricity, while her savings had trickled and dwindled. She bit her lip. She didn’t know how she was going to repay him.

Her mother
didn’t approve of the arrangement, of her living with a man, and wanted her to marry him. But in general, her mom wasn’t a good judge of character after two divorces. There was always something off-kilter with Tom, something not quite normal. Sometimes it was a good thing, sometimes not. It was a mix of genius and madness. She started to make a list of the pros and cons in her head as she washed the dirty dishes from her baking spree.

Cons:
What kind of grown man honest to God believes in time travel? She wondered.

As her fingers rinsed silverware under the cold water
, Claudia thought back in time to when she first picked him up in a club. This was when she actually had a little money and could afford to go out. About a hundred people were gyrating around them, grinding to the pulsing music. Girls flung their hair through the air and shook their booties. Guys did pelvic thrusts and bopped their heads up and down like an army of robotic clones.

All of her girlfriends had already left her, each hand in hand with one of the clones. Claudia was still looking around, waiting for something original.
Maybe it was the wrong place to look. A man kept coming up behind her and gyrating against her ass. She had to grab his hands to keep them out from under her shirt. Geezus, she thought. This one’s way too wasted.

“I have a boyfriend,” she said.

“I won’t tell,” he said.

It wouldn’t have happened if they had followed the golden drinking rule: Leave no girl behind.

Tom stood out in his simplicity and the fact he wasn’t trying so hard. He wore a simple white shirt and drank vodka laced with ice cubes. He didn’t have gel in his hair. He wasn’t trying all that hard to get her attention, but he gave her a soft smile.

She walked over to him at the bar and was relieved when he didn’t start incessantly groping her.

After a few drinks together, he asked to come home with her. She said she couldn’t. She just wasn’t that kind of girl.

“Please
, you don’t understand. I really don’t have anywhere else to go tonight,” he said.

Why did she believe h
im? There was something about him she trusted, a kindness in his eyes. She paused for a moment and drank out of the thin, red straw.

“Fine but no sex,” she told him. “I don’t take strangers home.”

Ultimately, it was the four long islands that made her agree, because taking a stranger into her home was exactly what she was doing. She felt drunkenly invincible.

“That’s fine,” he said. “I’ve got a girlfriend anyway.”

“Why doesn’t she let you stay with her?”

“She’s mean,” he said, leaning closer to her and touching her arm. “Maybe I should find someone nicer. Someone like you.”

“Oh, so original,” she laughed, as she tried to hail a cab full of people. She shivered and he put his jacket around her shoulders without asking if she was cold.

Claudia didn’t remember exactly what happened after that, but when she woke up the next morning, she had an artist sleeping in her spare room and he hadn’t left since. She was almost disappointed he turned out to be such a gentleman. At first she wondered if he was gay.

The stranger was strange. The gentleman was gentle.

The first thing he did when he got up that morning was walk through the whole apartment, running his hands along the bare white walls. His fingers touched all the empty surfaces, searching for something that wasn’t there.

“What the hell are you doing?” Claudia asked him. She stared at his hands, then the messy black hair sticking up in all directions and his wrinkled, white shirt. He was too lost in thought to care what he looked like.

“How boring,” he said more to himself than to her. “Nothing at all on your walls. How can you live like this?”

“I don’t really think about it, I guess,” she yawned. “It just doesn’t seem that important to have something hanging on the walls.”

“Really? If I knew you better, I’d slap you,” He held back his hand and grinned. “What you’ve got on your walls is important. Well, to me, at least, nothing’s more important than the art that speaks to your soul. It’s who you are.”

Claudia rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers. Even though she was hung over, she couldn’t help but smile.

“That’s sweet, but I don’t have the money to go off buying art,” she said. “You’re not insinuating that my soul is cheap and empty, are you?”

“Maybe I could help you,” he said.

“Yeah,
that’s an interesting way to put it,” Claudia laughed and nervously folded her bare arms. “Cause I’m the one who needs help.”

She felt strangely exposed in her T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. She may as well have been wearing a negligee the way he seemed to see through her.

“You’ve got a spare room,” he said. “I could paint you some in exchange for room and board for a month. Please. I really need a place to stay for a little while. The honest to God truth is my girlfriend kicked my ass out cause I didn’t have anything to contribute to the rent. I swear.”

He stared at the floor and crossed his arms.

“What if I don’t like what you paint?” Claudia said.

“I promise you will,” he said, looking up at her eyes. “I’ll paint you some of my best dreams.”

“I should just kick you out right now,” she said. “I can just see you on the corner with a cardboard sign that says, ‘will paint for food.’”

“But you won’t,” he said, touching her arm.

“I’m not sure. I barely know you.”

“Please, Claudia.”

“Maybe if you make me pancakes.” Her stomach growled. “I’m hungry. I’m a lousy cook. And don’t get any ideas.”

“Sure, I’ll cook for food.”
He smiled and then he got to work. He pulled out a heavy griddle and set it on the stovetop.

The next day he returned, juggling a torn duffel bag full of his worldly possessions, a dilapidated easel, a stack of canvases and a smaller bag full of tubes of paint.

“It was a bitch carrying all this on the train,” he said, throwing the bags down onto the bed in his new room.

“I told my girlfriend, if she still wants me, I’d move back in after getting a decent-paying job. We’ll see.”

He didn’t look Claudia in the eye when he said this.

She didn’t like that. She wondered if he had told her he was moving in with another girl, but didn’t ask.

She wondered if he was any good as an artist.

It was strangely exciting to see what he would create. She was tired of living alone, anyway.

But it took him days to get started on his painting. Every morning before she left for work, he was sitting in his boxers eating her Cheerios.

“Can you at least put on pants?” she would ask and he would, for a while.

She’d come back from work and he’d be sitting on the couch watching “Judge Judy,” and yelling “not guilty!” at the TV screen.

She started to wonder if it was all a lie, if she was just the world’s biggest sucker with a mooch living in her apartment. Maybe his ex had it right and he was just a con artist in search of a sugar mama.

“Why haven’t you started painting yet?” It made her mouth feel dry and her stomach twinge nervously every time she asked.

“I’m waiting for the right dream,” he’d say.

So after ten days, Claudia decided it was time to evict. Just as she was about to raise her fist and knock on his bedroom door, he opened it.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said, smiling. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the room. And suddenly she could smell the paint fumes emanating from the corner, like the smell of wet soil after a rain.

Tom wore a white shirt, which she found odd for someone surrounded by paint, but not a drop had touched the fabric.

It was a brown-haired woman in a white dress on the beach with her feet just touching the shimmering blue water and a black dog sitting neatly by her side.

“That is a pretty picture,” she said. “I like it.”

“It’s you,” he said, nervously, with his fingers in his mouth.

“It’s hard to tell with her facing away,” Claudia said. “But it can’t be me. She’s got long hair coiled in an updo, and I have short hair.”

“It is you, just not you at this moment,” he said, crossing his arms. “She’s
you at a different time. Your hair won’t always be short.”

“But I like my hair short,” Claudia said, patting the back of it. “And I don’t have a dog. Don’t get me wrong. I like it.”

He frowned.

“I love it. I like the light in the picture,” she said. It was drenched in a yellow white glow. “I like the way the sunlight reflects off the water and the sand and her skin. It seems like everything is glowing with happiness.”

She smiled. The man was actually talented.

Tom explained the inspiration behind his work, over breakfast a few days later. He was just wearing
his boxers, of course. After two weeks, she had given up asking him to put on pants. At least he didn’t have a beer belly. In fact, his stomach was closer to a six-pack. She usually tried not to look at it. It was too distracting.

“Pleasant dreams?” he asked, when she sat down and started eating half a bowl of Cheerios. It was the last dusty dredges of the box in her bowl, after he had finished most of the box.

“No dreams that I remember,” she said.

“Sad,” he said. “I dream all the time. That’s how I get the ideas for my paintings.

“I believe we time travel in our dreams,” he said. “That’s the theme of my work. The images we see aren’t just random. They’re the future, the past and the present without any context. It might be from our lives, past lives or those of others, people long dead or who haven’t even been born yet. Even animals. So it doesn’t always make a lot of sense to us.”

“What about the crazy dreams?” she asked. “Like where you are banging your high school history teacher and flying across corn fields?”

“Well, not every dream predicts the future, but a certain kind of dream,” Tom said.

“But how can you tell the difference?” she said.

“You just can. There’s a certain vibe, but it is tricky. You are just seeing one little piece of the picture.” He used his fingers to form a frame in front of his eyes. “You might not recognize it until years later.”

“That’s kind of a neat idea,” Claudia said. “But I don’t know. You really believe that?”