As She Climbed Across the Table

26

Three nights later, Alice loaded up the back of her Toyota with fifteen or twenty dashed-off paintings, and drove the short distance to the physics facility. She parked in the faculty lot, then piled the paintings through the main entrance and into the elevator.

I followed at a safe distance in my Datsun, and then on foot. Unseen.

The canvases were mostly self-portraits, painted in nervous, choppy brush strokes, images hacked out of the murk. There were a few abstractions, and a few still lifes. One painting of Evan and Garth. I liked her new work, actually. It was better than the earlier stuff. Maybe the emotional strain had freed her inhibitions, pushed her closer to the edge where art occurs. She’d certainly perfected a kind of 1950s painter’s temperament: surly, nonverbal, and permanently strung out.

But would Lack like them?

We were going to find out.

When the elevator doors closed, I took the stairs, feeling like a spy. The stairwell, with its bare concrete walls, fallout-shelter notices, and unadorned light bulbs glaring from within iron cages, was perfect for espionage fantasies. It went on and on. There were three landings, three twists of stair, for every numbered floor. The building had extra depths, layers the elevator skipped. I wondered if the building contained its own opposite, an anti-building where anti-physicists collided anti-particles. Anti-men who paused only to wonder at the odd sounds coming from the floors and ceilings.

At Lack’s floor I opened the emergency exit. I was alone in the corridor—no Alice. I went into the observation room and found Braxia, dressed in a lab coat, eating an apple, chewing with his mouth open.

He tilted his head to indicate the chamber. “She wants privacy,” he said.

“She took the paintings in?”

He nodded.

So Alice was alone inside, with Lack. The fundamental situation. This was the closest I’d come to it. I was annoyed to have Braxia there.

“She’s offering the paintings to Lack,” I said. “They’re self-portraits. Surrogate selves.”

Braxia smiled, crunched, swallowed. “Is something like physics, I think. To paint a self-portrait. You look at this thing, and it moves. You try to portray it, and it changes. You look out of the corner of your eye, it eludes you. You stare straight, you widen your eyes, and it makes a face at you.”

I slumped down against the wall, across from the entrance to the chamber, fixing my gaze on Braxia’s kneecaps.

“Okay,” he said. “You can’t talk now, about interesting things. You have to be worried and serious. I understand. So, if you will stay and be worried, I will go home and take a nap. You think I want to stay down here all night? I’ll watch television.”

“I’ll stay,” I said.

“It could be a long time,” he said. “You want to get some dinner, come back? I’ll wait.”

“I’m fine.”

Braxia shrugged, and went out. A moment later I heard the gurgle of the elevator as it ferried him up to the lobby.

Leaving me alone, on AliceWatch.

I stretched out my legs, checked the time, took a deep breath. This was what I wanted, supposedly, to have her under my care. So I settled down to wait.

I started by listening intently, then realized there was nothing to hear.

I tensed my body for action. Then untensed it. There wasn’t any action.

My brain composed another bright dialogue. But I knew Alice wouldn’t provide the responses needed to cue my witticisms.

Alice was alone with her Lack. I was alone with mine. Mine was less interesting than hers, I realized. She was obsessed, and I was bored. Bored and hungry and lonely.

I was lonely for anyone, lonely for a human voice. Cynthia Jalter, maybe. Or Evan and Garth. I was lonely enough to wish Braxia would come back and jabber at me.

The pay phone was just out of sight around the curve of the hallway. I could order food. I’d only abandon Alice for a moment. I went to the phone. The directory had been half-shredded out of its protective binder, but I found the number of a pizzeria near campus.

“I want a small pizza and a bottle of beer,” I explained to the boyish voice on the other end of the line. “But no cheese. Can you give me a small pizza without cheese?”

“That’s unusual,” said the voice. “Let me check. I’ll put you on hold.”

He came back. “One small pizza, no cheese. Any specials?”

“Specials?”

“Special aspects, you know. Things. Mushroom, garlic, pineapple.”

“Mushrooms.”

“Just one? You get a discount if you get three.”

I thought about it. “What if we consider no cheese a special?”

“Um, okay. So let’s see, that’s one small pizza, mushrooms, no cheese. Pick one more.”

“How about no pineapple?”

There was a pause. “Let me check.”

“Forget it,” I said when he came back. “I don’t want a pizza. No cheese was the giveaway. Can you just bring me the beer? Talking about pizza made me thirsty.”

“I don’t think I can do that, sir. I think just beer is against the rules, and it might even be illegal. I might get fired or arrested.”

“Check,” I said. “Put me on hold.”

“I think I’ll do that, sir.”

I heard footsteps in the corridor, moving toward the elevator. Startled, I dropped the phone, and ran to look. A woman was just disappearing around the curve. Alice’s height, and blond, but with hair cut close to her scalp, in a ragged, amateur crew cut. Someone else, in other words. But where had she come from? I dashed back to the chamber, baffled.

The door was open. I looked inside. No Alice. The spotlight glared against Lack’s bare table, creating a blinding reflection. The room was like a set for a Beckett play. A pair of scissors lay on the floor, and a stack of Alice’s paintings leaned against the far wall. Otherwise the room was empty. I went to the paintings. They were the self-portraits, Alice’s tortured menagerie of selves.

The other paintings were gone, the still lifes and abstractions, the painting of Evan and Garth. Lack had taken those.

He’d found her other work to his liking, apparently. But not the self-portraits.

Then I saw the yellow shadow scattered across the floor, beside the scissors. It was Alice’s hair. Her blond hair. My pillow, once. I’d stained it with tears. Now it was on a lab floor. I reached down and gathered up a handful, and held it to my nose. Alice’s smell. I remembered her brushing her hair, head lowered. I remembered yanking on it as we fucked. Here it was, hacked off, tossed at Lack, and refused. I dropped it and ran out into the hallway. She was gone.