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“Todd’s distant, I told you that. It never occurred to him I didn’t have to go all the way to California to have an affair.”
He spent the night in a single room, didn’t sleep.
At dawn he dressed. The phone rang as he was closing his overnighter. He didn’t answer. He knew who it was.
It was early. He shared the lobby with a yawning desk clerk, no one else. The clerk called him a cab. Cooke told the driver to take him to the nearest car rental.
He drove straight through to Chicago, stopping only to relieve himself and gas up. The treasures of heartland history offered no appeal. Cities, counties, states swept past in a white blur. Recent events played across his windshield. So this was what they meant when they said a man’s life flashed before his eyes in the moment of drowning. What they didn’t say was that only the worst parts showed up.
He smacked the horn button hard. When the driver of the car in front of him made the natural hand gesture, he held up both his hands in apology. His palm continued to sting for miles.
He exited the interstate at first light, rolling through deserted streets, bleak as death; the perfect metaphor for his state of mind.
He parked beside his tired old car in the little lot behind his building. His key made a racket in the back door and again in the door of his apartment, but no one appeared to investigate the noise. He might have been the sole survivor of a nuclear war.
He stretched out fully clothed on his pull-down bed. If he slept at all, it brought no rest. With the sun plowing through the north window, traffic swishing past on the street, he got up, tore the unfinished canvas from his easel, and flung it into a corner, hard enough to splinter the wooden stretcher. He replaced it and painted feverishly, while the memory of his subject was still raw; painted until well past dark, when the gnawing in his gut reminded him he hadn’t eaten in three days. He spread peanut butter on a slice of doubtful bread and ate it as he swept his brush in angry slashes with his other hand: back and forth, up and down, southwest to northeast and back. Gouts of red and black and yellow, yellow, yellow flew from the overloaded bristles, streaking his face and clothes like a butcher’s apron.
It was finished by midnight, a personal best.
When the paint dried the next day, he sent it to the paperback publisher in a priority box. A sign belonging to a men’s clothing store greeted him when he left the post office.
He wore his new suit to two interviews. Waiting for a callback, he finished three projects in a week: a charcoal sketch, an acrylic done entirely in monochrome, and a watercolor he didn’t much care for and threw away.
The phone rang. It was the managing editor of the paperback firm. He’d almost forgotten about his submission.
“Mr. Cooke? Thank you for sending such a stunning example of your work. The savage emotion is palpable; our staff was really impressed. Um, we’re not looking for abstract expression at this time—”
“I understand. Thanks for calling.”
“—but,” continued the other, before he could ring off, “as you know, we specialize in reprints: detective stories, Westerns, science fiction from the 1950s, before computers got involved. We’re a small enterprise, but I think we can manage a decent salary for an art director, with benefits. Can I interest a talented expressionist in interviewing for the job?”
