The Whore's Child

the most beautiful women
I’ve
ever laid eyes on.”
    Yes, Martin thought. That was obvious from the moment he’d opened the crate. And his next question was the reason he’d come so far. “Why?” he heard himself ask. “What was it about her?”
    â€œI thought you didn’t want to talk about aesthetics, Martin,” the painter replied.
    That night, Martin and Beth ate by candlelight in the inn’s small dining room. The candles were a matter of necessity. The storm had blown up out of nowhere, or so it seemed to Martin. The sun had disappeared behind that first cloud when he’d arrived at Trevor’s studio; by the time he’d left, an hour later, the sky was rumbling with dark, low thunderheads from horizon to horizon. The painter, predicting that the island would lose power, had insisted that Martin take a flashlight with him. “Just leave it in the room,” he’d instructed. “I run into Dennis and Pat all the time. They can return it whenever.” When Martin smiled at this and shook his head, Trevor read his thought and nodded in agreement. “Island life, Martin. Island life.”
    He had walked with Martin as far as the gate, an effort that clearly cost him. “What’s wrong with your leg, Robert?” Martin asked as he lifted the latch to let himself out.
    â€œIt’s my hip, actually. It needs replacing, they tell me. I’m thinking about it.”
    Martin remembered the battered table Trevor used for his paints, the broken leg he continued to prop under it. Unless he was very much mistaken, Trevor wasn’t the sort of man who put much faith in “replacement.”
    â€œYou didn’t come to visit her,” Martin remarked—one last-ditch attempt at censure—after the gate swung shut between them.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou could have,” he said. “You could have shown up with Joyce, claimed to be an old friend. I wouldn’t have known.”
    â€œI thought about it,” Trevor admitted. “But I had it on excellent authority that I wasn’t needed. You rose to the occasion, is what I heard.”
    In the distance, a low rumble of thunder.
    â€œThat’s what our friend Joyce can’t quite forgive you for, by the way,” he continued. “Your devotion during those last months enraged her. Up to that point, she’d always felt perfectly justified in despising you.”
    â€œYou mean I rose to the occasion of her death, but not her life?”
    â€œSomething like that,” Trevor nodded. “But look at it this way. You got a damn good painting out of that woman’s need to punish you.”
    â€œI don’t know what to do with it, though,” Martin said. “I had to rent one of those self-storage units out in the valley.”
    â€œAir-conditioned, I hope.”
    Martin smiled. “It’s the only thing in there.”
    â€œI’d love to have it back, if you don’t want it.”
    â€œIt’ll be even harder to look at now,” he’d admitted, though he knew he’d never return the painting to Trevor. “That look of longing on her face. The way she was standing there. I’m always going to know it was you she wanted to come through that door.”
    â€œWrong again, Martin.” Trevor was leaning heavily with both hands on the gate now, letting Martin know that a handshake wasn’t any more necessary now than it had been earlier. It suddenly dawned on Martin that the man had to be in his seventies. “I was the one who
did
come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.”
    â€œSo,” Beth said, digging into her steak with genuine appetite. At least, Martin thought, she wasn’t one of those L.A. girls who always order fish and drink nothing but mineral water. “Were you worried about me?”
    â€œYes,” he said. He’d been waiting for her in a rocking chair on the inn’s front porch, the sky growing blacker and blacker, when she came striding down the dirt path. She’d no more than sat down next to him than the air sizzled with electricity and the first bolt of lightning cleaved the sky.
    â€œYou forget I’m from Minnesota,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “I spent the first twenty years of my life watching storms. And how was your lazy afternoon, old man?”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œJust fine?”
    â€œI visited a studio.