Page 26 of Whistle

“Pardon?” Annie said.

“I can let it go for ten.”

“I don’t think so,” Annie said.

“I have it,” Charlie said, digging into his front pocket.

He brought out a five, three ones, and some change. He was counting it out aloud, moving the funds from one hand to the other as he did so. “Six, seven, eight, twenty cents, thirty cents—”

“What you got there is just fine,” the woman said, holding out her hand. Charlie put his money into her palm, Annie watching, shaking her head.

Okay, she thought,maybe this will be a lesson learned. A fool and his money are soon parted, her own mother used to say. When Charlie got this bike home and it fell apart before he reached the end of the driveway, he’d listen to his mother the next time she advised him against a purchase.

“A pleasure doing business with you,” the woman said. “Let me get a pump for that tire.”

Moments later she was back, hooking a hose to the nozzle on the back tire. “Why don’t you do it,” she suggested to Charlie. After she demonstrated how to use the device, he forced some air into the tire, then felt it between thumb and forefinger.

“Seems hard,” he said.

“Tell ya what. I’ll throw in the pump. If it gets soft again, you can pump it up at home.”

Charlie beamed. As he wheeled it out of the store and toward the car, he asked if they could go back to the hardware store and get some special cleaner so he could get the rust off the rims.

“Why the hell not?” Annie said.

Once they were back at their temporary home, Charlie spent the rest of the afternoon with a rag and a tin of Brasso with the intention of making the bike look, if not brand-new, perhaps newer.

“When you’re done cleaning it up, you call me before you start pedaling all over the place on it,” Annie said. “There’s some ground rules to go over.”

“Like what?”

“Call me. Understood?”

“Understood,” he said wearily.

While he worked on his bike, Annie went up to the second-floor studio. She stood just inside the doorway for a moment, sizing the place up. It appeared recently painted, judging by how free of marks the walls were, and the fresh coat of white made the room look bigger than it was. In the ceiling were two skylights that filled the space with sunshine. There wasn’t a shadow anywhere except for under the chair and worktable Finnegan had arranged for.

She walked over to the chair, ran her hand along the back of it. Almost inexorably, she found herself sitting in it, giving it a little bounce, taking it for a test drive.

Nicer than her studio chair in the city, Annie thought.

She surveyed the items at the edge of the table. A large coffee can filled with markers and pencils and brushes. In another can, a rainbow’s worth of tubes of paint. Plus, several large pads of art paper. Even some bricks of plasticine in a variety of colors, all wrapped in clear plastic.

Annie tore off a sheet of paper and secured the four corners to the table surface with short strips of masking tape.

A blank page.

She’d been good friends with an artist fromThe New Yorker, now passed on, whom she often met for lunch at Café Luxembourg up on West 70th Street near 10th Avenue. He was something of a fixture there, sitting in the corner, sipping on a scotch, always at the same table, where he had a view of the various neighborhood celebs who might wander in. He had said something to her oncethat had always stayed with her. “I never had a drawing that was as good on paper as it had been in my head.”

Boy, did she get that. She could imagine so clearly what she wanted to create, but what traveled down from her brain, through her arms, and out her fingers onto the paper so rarely lived up to expectations. But then, that was the challenge, wasn’t it? If it was easy, what would be the point? If anybody could do it, everybody would do it.

She knew this happened even more with novelists, and was something of a running joke among them, but she was often asked where her ideas came from. Like there was a store someplace, an Ideas R Us, where you could buy them by the dozen. She always just smiled and said she didn’t know, that an idea would just pop into her head and she’d run with it.

The truth was, she did know, but was at pains to explain it. She’d tried more than once with John.

“Imagine an image on a pane of glass that’s flipping slowly through the air,” she’d told him. “Sometimes you can see it straight on, but other times, if you’re looking at the glass from the edge, it’s just a line, the image vanishes.”

John had listened intently, trying to picture it.

---