This Dog for Hire

everything he’d done, and later, now, I just felt like a little shit-eating sissy, but I never knew why.”
    “Clifford, the word ‘sissy’—”
    “Faggot, fairy, queen, homo, you mean that word?” he shouted. “Yes, and let’s not forget sissy. Sissy boy. He called me that, too. That, in fact, was another of his favorites.”
    “Do you feel that what your brother did had anything to do with your sexual orientation?”
    “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
    He sat quietly, his eyes filling, tears spilling out over the rims, not blinking, not catching those tears with a tissue, not wiping them away with his fingers. No, he just sat.
    “Of course not,” he whispered. “It had to do with my feeling like a little shit-eating sissy. It had to do with my always feeling inadequate, at fault, ugly, stupid, guilty.”
    I thought I heard Kleinman crying, too.
    “But my sexual orientation is God-given. Peter didn’t have anything to do with that. No matter what I thought when I was a little boy, Peter is not God.” I heard Kleinman ask Cliff if he was all right, and then static indicated that the session had ended.
    A week later, Clifford needing a shave, Clifford looking as if he hadn’t slept in days:
    “I told him blood will tell. I told him that Morton was doing to Lester, his precious Lester, what he had done to me.”
    “You told him that over dinner?”
    “No, I told him that by painting it.”
    Les and mor, for God’s sake. Lester and Morton. Peter’s boys.
    That’s why it wasn’t at the show.
    Peter had seen it the night that Dennis left the key for him. And after Louis had invited him to the opening, he’d done what any father would do. He’d gone back, to rescue his children.
    “After that first confrontation, Clifford, what did you actually say to Peter?”
    “I’ve been painting,” he said. It was on his shirt, and in his hair.
    Orange, like the basketball the young boy in the dress was holding.
    Peter. In a dress.
    So that’s how he would hurt him!
    “What do you mean, Cliff?”
    “I’ve been painting the truth, painting him the way he really is, the way he should be seen. Oh, he thought he made my life a drag! Wait until he sees what I can do to his life.”
    Bitter laughter.
    “But you haven’t tried talking to Peter again?
    Silence.
    “Maybe in time, Clifford, you’ll be able to. Right now, you need time to deal with your own feeling** with this terrible pain, so that you will be able to i 1 '* go of it sometime in the future.”
    Snort.
    “He needs time, too, Clifford. All he can feel n<    “I told him. I also told him I wanted him to feel how I felt. He’s my brother, isn’t he? So I want to share with him how shame feels, how fear feels, how it would feel to be threatened with exposure and humiliation, all the things that I felt. Thanks to him.”
    “You told him about the paintings? What did he say?”
    “He laughed at me. Who cares what you paint? Who’ll ever see what you paint? And then he hung up.”

    “Listen, Dennis,” I had said late last night when he picked up, half asleep, “there’s something bothering me.”
    “What?”
    Well, to tell the truth, it was more like wha? It seemed Dennis had finally gotten over his insomnia. I forged ahead anyway.
    “It’s about those three missing canvases. Have you thought about them at all?”
    “Sure. I figured Louis took them to keep for himself.”
    “Why take them off the frames?”
    “A lot of people do that, roll the canvas so that takes less space, you know, store it in a tube, maybe he didn’t have room for them. I understand his place is really small.”
    “But he had one painting at the show that was not for sale. Why hold three out?”
    “He has that right. Maybe he didn’t like them.
    Or maybe he loved them. Maybe they were personal. Who knows?”
    “I’d like to.”
    “Now? Couldn’t it wait until morning?”
    I looked at my watch. It was after two.
    “Sorry. I’ll catch you tomorrow. I mean tonight.“
    I had wanted to tell him everything I had learned, but it could wait. At least until I was sure.
    The catalog listed fifty-three works. I thought that’s what Louis had said, too—or was it Veronica? Yes, she had said there were forty-seven paintings and five pieces of sculpture, and that’s what was listed. Everything accounted for.
    Except what had been on those empty stretchers. Two works in