And then one of the men from the card circle came over and sidled up next to us. He swayed standing against the bar, his teeth yellowed, cheeks sallow, and gave us a wink.
“Gataaaas,” he said. The bartender was off somewhere sweeping the floor.
Celia turned her back to him, but her resistance enticed him even more. He cozied his hip against hers, purring and laughing.
“Tá bom,” she said, firmly, but he mistook her protests for banter.
“Já chega,” she said and, perhaps realizing that words alone weren’t enough, she curled her top lip and hissssssed, baring her teeth at him.
His eyes widened, but he didn’t leave, so she let out another HISSSSS, even louder and sharper, which sent him scurrying away to his friends. I saw that one of the men asked him what had happened, but he shook his head and said they should continue the game. Not to bother with us.
“I’m glad I met you,” I said.
“You too,” she said.
Celia was the one who said it was time for her to go. She worried that she would be too drunk to cook dinner and it was her night to feed her roommates. We walked to the curb and she reached inside my pocket to make sure her number was still there.
“Don’t forget,” she said, and stuffed it in my hand. Then she hopped into a taxi and sped off, her arm waving out the window.
The walk home sobered me up a bit. When I arrived, Marta had already come and gone, and you weren’t back yet from school. I went to the bathroom and removed your suit. It had stiffened with dried rainwater. I brought it into the laundry room and considered how I might wash it without having to explain why it needed a wash. It wasn’t dirty—you had just had it cleaned for your first day of school. In a jar on the windowsill there was a blue pen inscribed with the university insignia. Maybe I could scribble, just a line, and convince you it had happened while you were grading. Had you even been grading in this suit? I drew the line but it seemed too insignificant for a full wash. I drew another line, and then another, until eventually I snapped the pen in half and poured ink across the fabric, from the collar to the breast pocket. I drew a water bath and plunged it inside.
I do feel guilty, Dennis, but the suit had lived its full life that day. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing you wearing it for some meaningless conference.
Once I’d sopped up the ink in the soapy water, I took a warm shower, wrapped myself in a towel, and slept off the alcohol. You arrived a couple hours later. As soon as you walked through the door, I could see the dismay on your face.
“What happened?” I asked.
“It rained halfway through my walk to work. I spent the day soaking wet. A hurricane is coming up the coast. It’s the first hurricane Brazil has ever seen. My students were panicked.” You put your briefcase down on the kitchen table. “Is there anything to eat?”
I handed you a mango and told you I had bad news too.
“The white suit you love. I noticed a big blue stain, right above the breast pocket.”
You pressed your hand to your forehead. This was your favorite suit, your most expensive suit, a gift from your uncle.
“There must have been a pen in the pocket,” I continued. “And it broke. It’s soaking in the back.”
You rushed to the laundry room.
“It’s ruined,” you said, holding a sleeve out of the water bath. “What a shame.”
I rubbed your back.
“Maybe Marta can fix it.”
We agreed that we should ask Marta to try her hand at fixing the stain, so I left it in the sink until the following day. I brought her to the laundry room when she arrived in the morning.
“Dennis’s suit has a little stain on it. Can you remove it?”
Because I’d left the fresh stain sitting in the water, the ink had diluted and absorbed into the rest of the jacket, dying the fabric a powder blue.
“Ai meu Deus,” Marta said and wrung out the excess water. “I will fix it.”
She stayed determined through the day, adding more detergent and scrubbing it against the washboard. But by the end of the afternoon, she had to admit defeat. There was nothing she could do.
“It’s fine,” I told her. “You tried.”
I felt the overwhelming urge to paint. A levee had broken, and my mind filled with Celia. At first I didn’t know it was her; at first she appeared as a burst of inspiration.
“I’m going to start painting,” I declared. It was seven in the morning and you were getting ready for school.
“Oh yeah?” you said without any pants on, combing your wet hair in the mirror.
“Yeah. Do you know where I can buy paint supplies?”
“I don’t. Maybe Marta knows.”
I waited two more hours for Marta to arrive. She brought out an old phone book from a low cabinet and thumbed through the thin pages until she found an art supply store in Brooklin Novo. I took the subway and tried not to appear too obvious as I studied the map, memorizing how many stops until I had to get off. Two stops, I thought. Two stops. The young boy next to me listening to a Walkman, the woman across, carrying her daughter in one arm, a basket of groceries in the other, were all tired and quiet, unaware of my presence.
The store Marta had found was meant for children, I soon learned. A bored clown looking for faces to paint greeted me at the door. Speaking in mime, he pulled me into a seat and began to decorate my cheek with a glittering butterfly. I was too confused to understand how to protest, but I liked the pressure he put on my collarbone to steady his painting hand. When he finished, a young store clerk helped me find the oil paint supplies. She filled my cart with everything she said I would need—paints, yes, but also an easel, canvases, linseed oil, large and small natural-hair brushes, sponges, a palette knife and a palette. She even called a taxi for me, since I was now adorned with too many bags to take the subway home, and waved sweetly from the entrance, the clown not far behind her. That’s when I looked at the receipt and saw the price tag, nearly two hundred reais, and felt the twist in my throat that I had committed to more than an afternoon of leisure.
It started with an eleven-by-fourteen-inch canvas and a milky yellow coat. I set up my easel and a stool in the living room near the window. A strip of sunlight fell across my thighs. I waited for the coat to dry. Then I used pencil to sketch the outline of a face, just a face, that filled the frame. I had never painted before, never seriously, but it felt good to let my instincts lead the way. It took forever to get the size of the eyes right, the proportion, echoes of failed ovals enveloped each other, until finally I gave up perfection and dipped my brush. The oil paint pushed like soft clay on a riverbed—one minute it ran in a fluid stream, the next it was an embankment for another color washing in. The brush wasn’t a vessel to transfer color so much as an instrument to contain, to manipulate, to stoke and calm. I finished the eleven-by-fourteen face and painted three more.