Annie picked up her chalk and waded into the river up to her knees. By the time she had finished sketching the outlines of Hans Christian Andersen, complete with his tall top hat, it was ten o’clock. She stopped and came down the ladder and leaned against the kitchen counter to have breakfast. With her coffee cup in her hand, she turned around to gloat at her wall.
At once she saw the stain, a new unwanted addition to her procession of majestic figures.
This time it was not an accident, not an accumulation of mildew and damp. It was a face, a blank face surrounded by an aureole of yellow hair. Drips of red paint streamed down from the face like drops of blood.
Annie’s happiness turned to dread. What the hell was going on? Someone was invading her wall, encroaching on her enchanted territory. While she was sleeping someone had come in silently and used her own brushes and her own jars of paint. She recognized the chrome yellow, the alizarin crimson. But when she climbed the scaffolding to look at her jars and her can of brushes they looked the same as always. Was one of the brushes wet? No, all of them were clean and dry.
Annie climbed down the ladder again and walked back to the place where the new face had appeared, thinking about her artistic friends. Last week she had invited a lot of them to a housewarming party. They had all seen her wall. Any one of them could have played this trick on her. Of course they couldn’t all draw as cleverly as this. Perry Chestnut was a potter, Minnie Peck a sculptor, and Henrietta Willsey a minimalist poet. Wallace Feather specialized in whole-body casts, Henry Coombs constructed big things he called installations, and Trudy Tuck made fancy candles she insisted were works of art. And yet—
“Oh, no, my God.” It was Flimnap, staring up at the new face. He had come in silently, carrying a garden fork.
Annie didn’t have to tell him what to do. He got to work at once, unlocking the wheels of the scaffolding, rolling it along the wall, locking the wheels again, and climbing up to eliminate the blank white face, the mop of yellow hair, the drops of blood.
Annie watched. Flimnap’s hands were wonderful in action, those hands that could juggle balls and bananas and pebbles so deftly and paint window frames so neatly. His long fingers moved as if they had brains of their own. They gripped and lifted and carried, adjusted and tested. She imagined them touching her hair and cradling her face.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Flimnap?” she said dreamily. “You put it there. You painted that face yourself.”
He glanced at her from the high plank, then came down the ladder. “Look.” He picked up a piece of chalk and scrawled something on the newspaper covering the table, a clumsy pair of circles with two ears and a tail. It was a child’s drawing of a cat. “That’s the best I can do,” said Flimnap, and, smiling at her, he put down the chalk and climbed up the ladder again.
He couldn’t draw, and yet he seemed to know about children’s picture books. Not hers, but Miguel Delgado’s crazy clowns and Antonio Amici’s dazzling colors, and one day she saw him leafing through Joseph Noakes’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Annie was surprised and pleased. “He’s great, don’t you thinks?”
Flimnap closed the book and said, “I hear he’s dead.”
“Dead!” Annie was shocked. “Oh, no! Who told you that?”
“I read it somewhere.”
“Oh, I’m really sorry.” Annie stared at Flimnap, feeling a sharp sense of loss. “What a shame! I love his impossible staircases that go around and around, and that picture of Gulliver tied down by his hair, with every strand casting a shadow. Oh, I can’t believe it.”
“Well, I guess it’s true.”
This morning, when he finished blotting out the bleeding face with its yellow hair, Flimnap picked up the garden fork again, tossed it over his head, caught it behind his back, waved it at her, and went back outside.
Annie watched him descend the hill in loping strides. Then she went into her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror over her dresser.
The thing was, never to be wistful again. Never to yearn after somebody, never to be pathetic. Not after all those gruesome mistakes in the past, getting married to Grainger Swann, and then falling stupidly in love with that screwball Burgess, and then with jut-jawed Jack, only to be dumped not once but twice. Never again would she be abject. The hell with Flimnap’s wonderful, nimble, extraordinary hands.
The mirror was whimsical, as usual. Three or four days a week she looked all right, as though a good fairy were in charge of the mirror. But then an uglifying witch elbowed the fairy aside. The state of Annie’s looks was completely random. She was beautiful sometimes—really!—homely at other times, and most of the time only so-so.