...And the Damage Done Read Free Page A

painted in warm earth-tones. In his portrait, Tom smokes while hunched over his coffee. Marie had caught the happy semi-grin that Tom wore whenever he lit up, knowing that he had successfully displaced his need for coke to the less lethal need for cigarettes and caffeine. Tom had disappeared as well, either to leave the city and its temptations or to be consumed by those temptations elsewhere, with no witnesses to his defeat by that which steady smoking and coffee had held at bay.
    “‘Tom,’” says Nell after I have named him. “I met him, I think. I just couldn’t remember his name.”
    We next stand before a portrait of Paul, whom Marie and I had met while he wore a cast, as he was recovering from the spite of a girlfriend who had smashed a jar of pennies onto his hand. Marie had painted Paul with his guitar on his lap—his face set as he worked the hand-exerciser that might one day give him back his music. The play of light on Paul’s face is like that of a Hopper; the look in his eyes is one of pain and hope.
    I tell Nell Paul’s name and his story, though I do not know if he has ever learned to play again.
    I feel my pulse throb in my neck as I speak to Nell, as I realize that Marie’s art has become more beautiful with her death. While she lived, it was timid of her light, even though what makes it beautiful is the investment of her light.
    Nell thanks me by offering me a plastic cup of jug wine from the crumb-ridden caterer’s table. I decline, and she seems to nod, as if remembering. By the table, on a small podium, is a photo album of Marie’s unfinished works. The cityscape view out of Marie’s living room window floats like some half-realized dream in the album behind a clear plastic sheet protector. The album feels as if something close to me might sleep among Marie’s other half-finished dreams and visions. If it is the face of another dead or lost friend, I can’t bear to look at it.
    Nell’s glance falls to the album, to the cityscape that had filled the window beneath which Marie had died.
    “Do you still have a key to Marie’s place?” she asks.
    “No,” I say, giving Nell insight into my relationship with Marie of which she may not have been aware.
    Nell looks down to the scavenged table, as if embarrassed by the question and my answer. She reaches for her purse and opens it.
    They
are coming. I feel them. Their approach is like the spread of wasp venom under newly stung skin. They have known my destination. They approach
en masse
, to reattempt the ambush they had intended for the bus stop. Because of their numbers, they feel close. Closer even than does Nell standing before me. I should flee to the anonymity of my apartment, to the safety of its smallness and the invisibility of its single window that faces a brick wall.
    Yet there is a safety in this moment that I feel, as Nell reaches into her purse and pulls forth a key ring. They will not come, I know, until this safe moment is over. Nell removes a key from where it dangles next to a shiny, newly-cut one just like it and hands it to me. I feel the residue on it of the grief and the anger she felt when the clerk at the coroner’s office handed it to her. The key scalds my hand, and I feel as if my palm might blister where she has placed it.
    “I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” says Nell. “Can you meet me at Marie’s sometime after ten? There are things . . .” her throat constricts, as does mine while I meet her eyes. “There are things Marie said she wanted you to have if anything happened to her.”
    Nell is furious; there is terrible beauty to rage on the face of one as graceful as she, even when such rage is hidden. Loss masks itself beneath her skin. She wishes to make her rage known, rage born of the sight of Marie’s face, haloed by the glow of a metal slab, the face I had seen moving with the simulacra of life when Marie and I had spoken our maimed farewell.
    “I can meet you there. After ten,” I say,