Forty-six

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, I was in the studio trying to make sense of my quarterly sales report and deposit slip from Clarice. I guessed it looked okay, but I had no idea what the heck I’d sold, how much I earned—other than the amount of the deposit—or what I still had available. And this report didn’t even include the showing in Vegas. I was about to shove everything in a drawer when Penny came in to do the Ice Queen books. Her job was a little slower now that we weren’t shipping as much from our online store. Raquethon had exclusive rights to our racquetball clothes. We weren’t doing dying in the studio, either. Melody’s summer line had sold out long ago and she decided the next line wouldn’t be released until May.

“Hey, Tony. How’s it going.”

“Oh, fine, Penny. Thanks. I’m just trying to figure out my finances and the royalty statement. I don’t know how much I make or what’s been sold. I don’t even know if I’ve got art for a show in the spring or if I’m living on borrowed time.”

“Let me see.—Okay.—This is inventory. Clarice hasn’t released the last five Bacchanalia prints yet, so you’ve got a whole suite that hasn’t seen the light of day. You’ve got three of the five suites of all twenty prints that haven’t been sold. The posters and art with Allison are going well, but this only shows her opening in Seattle. The Portland show was the same weekend you were in Las Vegas, so neither of those will show up until the next quarter report.”

Penny proceeded to explain my royalty statement to me, gave me a list of exactly what was in the vault, showed me what was on consignment to various galleries, and even did a recap of my grant for the chapel, even though it wasn’t on the current report. She had a handle on everything.

“Do you keep track of all this on a regular basis?” I asked.

“Well, since there’s less to do at Ice Queen right now, Melody asked me to bring everything current for your partnership so taxes could be filed for each of you. It’s fascinating how you set this relationship up as a business. I’m just filling in for a while.”

“Penny, I feel like I’m out of touch with a lot of this. Can I hire you part-time to be my business manager? I don’t want you to overlap with Clarice, but I need to understand all this stuff on a regular basis. I just want to know what I contribute.”

“Oh, you’re doing fine there. A lot of this is in the work I already do for the partnership. I don’t want to double dip, but if you could see your way clear to approve another hour or two a week, we should be able to educate you on your finances.”

“Thank you, Penny.”

“Just don’t ask me to pose for you. Yet.”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought a few times about doing a portrait of you. Your face is absolutely classic.”

“Yeah, but that’s not all you paint and I’m not quite ready to get naked with you.”

“Don’t worry, Penny. I would never pressure you into doing something like that. I have lots of models.”

“Hey. Don’t write it off. I said ‘yet.’”

It was exciting to finally be painting the frescoes. It wasn’t fast. I was still drawing and writing the stories. Each time I finished a painting, Andy would ask me to tell the story. I was becoming more comfortable with the storytelling. There was a difference between writing a story and walking through the chapel and telling a story. I tried to maintain painting a panel twice a week.

Even though the chapel wasn’t officially finished or dedicated, the Jesuit brothers began holding a kind of evening service there and I could listen to them singing. It wasn’t a mass or anything, so I guess it didn’t matter that the chapel hadn’t been consecrated. It was a kind of meditative song or chant and it made me feel peaceful. I asked Andy about it and he said it was called Taizé and started in France seventy years ago. Not all the people at the services wore clerical collars, and a couple of times even Whitney came in.

Saturday afternoon, Kate and I walked quietly back to the car at the end of a disastrous ‘date’. I’d thought that if I took her to one of her favorite places in the world, she’d relax and remember what great times we’d had there. And she did. Apparently, too well.

We’d laughed and talked, walking hand-in-hand around the nearly deserted zoo. There weren’t many people who thought the zoo was the place to visit in December. We stuck with the indoor exhibits most of the day since that was where most of the animals were anyway.

I told her we’d all missed going to a concert at the zoo this year. The past two years had been such a treat to us.

“I should have sent you the tickets. I didn’t even realize I had them in my bag,” Kate said.

“What?”

“I bought us tickets last fall when they went on sale. July thirtieth—Indigo Girls. I figured we’d all be back from watching you win the World Games and be ready to celebrate. Instead I was ... selling myself.” Kate started crying. Shit. This was not why I brought her here.

“Let’s put it behind us, Kate,” I whispered as I held her in my arms.

“I can’t put it behind me. I was so desperate, Tony. When I realized what I’d signed, I tried to charm him out of it. I offered to buy him out of it. The only way ... I offered myself.” Kate cried and held herself to me. I was so angry I couldn’t even put my arms around her.

“You told me he forced you.”

“He did. But it was my fault. The first time he kissed me I realized I’d made a mistake. I was so overwhelmed with self-loathing that I froze. He kept going and I started to fight him off. I said, ‘No. I can’t do this.’ He just kept pulling my clothes off. I pushed and scratched, but I couldn’t get away from the constant hammering in my head that this was what I deserved. I deserved to be humiliated and raped. I deserved everything he did. I hated myself. You think I deserved it, too.”

I managed to bring my hands up to Kate’s shoulders and tried to hold her. She pushed herself away from me.

“I understand what Wendy felt when she went back to Rafe. I understand why she felt that way. I understand what a terrible, dirty, self-centered person I am. I wash—douche—every day, but I’ll never be clean again. I lost everything. I’ll never have ... never have you back.”

I protested. I tried to reach for her—just to hold her hand again—but my own dark rage blinded me. No matter what her intent had been, she’d been raped. I said all the right words, but I couldn’t get them in the right order. I couldn’t get myself under control. In the end, I drove Kate home and went to the studio.

The canvas was strewn with bodies. Beautiful nude bodies bloodied by the monster that towered over them. I’d nailed a square canvas to a rectangular canvas to make an “L” lying on its side. I’d layered the paint on like plaster, so thick that you couldn’t see the seam.

I could recognize them all amidst the rubble and flames. Melody, her head at an odd angle, eyes wide open but vacant. Lissa, her torn limbs lying beside her broken body, her womb torn open. Wendy, her back flayed. Kate, gripped in the claws of the monster towering over them, terror in her eyes as he devoured her. Bree. Whitney. Allison. Beth. Rio. Amy. And shadows of more behind them. I could name each one. Sonia. Amanda. June. Tonya. Sandra. Erika. Rachel. Every woman I’d ever lusted for, touched, or painted. All broken. All dead. Everything I considered precious in ruin. The Guernica of my soul.

The beast was blind. It was Rage.

The rage bled from me as I stared at what I’d painted. I’d felt it. It burned through me. As I stared, I felt the horror and then the remorse. It was beyond repair. All I could do was tear it down and rebuild. My anger couldn’t focus on Slimy Dick. It overflowed on all that I touched—everything I held dear. My anger had gone beyond an emotion; it was a disease.