The Whore's Child by Richard Russo Read Free Book Online

this second.”
    Martin, of course, had demurred. The following week he was starting work on another picture, and Peter’s offer wasn’t so much literal as symbolic, a token to his gratitude. “You just saved this picture,” he told Martin out on the lot. “In fact, you just saved me.”
    The two men were shaking hands then, when Peter remembered. “I was sorry to hear about Laura,” he said, looking stricken. “It must have been awful.”
    “Pretty bad,” Martin admitted. “She weighed about eighty pounds at the end.”
    The two men looked around the lot. “Movies,” the director said, shaking his head. “I wonder what we’d have done if we’d decided to live real lives and have real careers.”
    “You love movies,” Martin pointed out.
    “I know,” Peter had admitted. “God help me, I do.”
    “Merely a technician,” Trevor repeated now, improbably seated across from Martin on the opposite coast. He’d already drained half his beer, while Martin, never a beer drinker, had barely touched his. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. In the end, maybe that’s all art is. Solid technique with a dash of style.”
    “I don’t much feel like talking about aesthetics, Robert.”
    “No, I don’t suppose you do,” the painter said, running his fingers through his hair. “Joyce told me she sent you that painting. I’d have tried to talk her out of that, had I known.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Laura wouldn’t have wanted her to. Funny to think of them as sisters, actually. Joyce always seeking vengeance. Laura anxious to forgive.”
    Which was true. Martin had seen photos of them as little girls, when it was hard to tell them apart. But by adolescence Laura was already flowering into the healthy, full-figured, ruddily complected woman she would become, whereas Joyce, pale and thin, had begun to look out at the world through dark, aggrieved eyes. When Martin had seen her yesterday, it was clear that not one of her myriad grievances had ever been addressed to her satisfaction.
    “So, Robert. How long were you and my wife lovers?”
    Trevor paused, deciding how best, or perhaps whether, to answer. “Why would you want to know that, Martin? How will knowing make anything better?”
    “How long?”
    After a beat, the painter said, “We had roughly twenty years’ worth of summers.”
    Right, Martin thought. The worst, then. Odd that he couldn’t remember whether Laura had ever directly deceived him, or whether she’d simply allowed him to deceive himself. He’d assumed that she needed this time with her sister each summer. That she never asked him to come along, given his opinion of Joyce, he’d considered a kindness.
    “A month one year. Six weeks the next. I painted her every minute I could, then kept at it when she was gone.”
    Yes. The worst. This was one of the things he’d needed to know, of course. “How many are there?”
    “Paintings?” Trevor asked. “A dozen finished oils. More watercolors. Hundreds of studies. The one Joyce sent you might be the best of the lot. You should hang on to it.”
    “Where are they?” he asked, then nodded at the studio. “Here?”
    “At my farm in Indiana.”
    “You never sold any of them?”
    “I’ve never
shown
any of them.”
    “Why not?”
    “She wouldn’t allow it when she was alive. Joyce kept the one you have in the guest room Laura used when she visited. Laura made her promise never to show anyone.”
    “She’s been dead for several years now.”
    “Also, there were your feelings to consider.”
    Martin snorted. “Please. You want me to believe you gave that a lot of thought?”
    “Not even remotely,” Trevor admitted. “Laura did, though. And . . . after her death . . . I starting thinking of the pictures as private. When I die will be time enough.”
    “So nobody knows about them?”
    “You do. Joyce. My New York agent
suspects,
and I’ve given instructions concerning them to my attorney.” He finished his beer, then peered