And she did, because she woke up the next morning, thought it through, his heartbreak and his anger, and she wished that she could articulate it the way he did, not with the cursing, but the way he told the story in a straight line, the way each emotion was so real and vibrant to him. Maybe there was something to be learned from him, she didn’t know what. She decided to be his friend.
So she brought the cards that she hadn’t had a chance to show him the night before, and he spread them out before him on his desk and smiled at each one as he read them. Then she talked to him about a line of her own greeting cards; it wasn’t high art, she knew, but people seemed to like her cards a lot when she sent them. She had done invitations for parties, too, baby showers and bachelorette parties, and everyone had always said, “You should have your own line,” and that stuck with her, that she could have something of her own, because right now she didn’t have very much of anything at all. But she had to be careful about where she put her work, she was protective of it at times, and she couldn’t see her cards sitting in any old Hallmark store. They’d gather dust in the back if she wasn’t careful.
A week later Doc sat for her for a sketch in his store, at a wide wooden table, animal claws for feet, and nicks on the top of it from a wild party where ladies danced on top of it in spiked heels—“You should have seen those girls dance.” Doc took phone calls and rang up forty-five dollars’ worth of sales and had something to say to practically everyone who walked in the door, knew them by first name, what they did, where they lived.
It was that first brisk fall day, and the wind had stung Sarah Lee’s cheeks, surprising her, and people would just walk into the store to warm up for a while.
When the sketch was done, Doc loved it. She had drawn him with his mouth slightly open, an evil yet seductive grin, and he had three sets of hands, all in motion. She drew him younger than he actually was, but she thought he needed to be captured that way. Doc framed it and put it up on the wall behind the cash register, a proud demon shopkeeper.
He tells her all the time now that people try to buy his picture right off the wall, but he never sells it. “You could sell more,” he tells her. “You could sit here on Saturdays and sell sketches for thirty bucks. People love shit like that.”
She still contemplates it from time to time, but she wasn’t sure if it would make her feel like one of those desperate failed artists trapped at Disney World, drawing caricatures of little girls with their favorite hobbies haunting the background. A tennis racket. A horse. A pretty blond doll with detachable parts.
AT LIBERATION, she finds Doc standing outside, smoking a cigarette. She asks him for a drag. He offers her a fresh one instead, and she accepts, feeling the cold brush off his arm onto hers where they meet for a moment. Then he lights another for himself, and the two of them stand outside in the cold for a while longer. The store is empty.
“Yeah, business has been bad since New Year’s,” says Doc. “Everyone’s broke, even the people who shouldn’t be broke, the rich kids in the condos. Or maybe they’re just all shopped out.” He motioned to a shiny new building down the street, where a doorman agonized behind a front desk. “No holiday spirit left. It’s all in the toilet. With my business.”
Sarah Lee looks at his stomach and waist to see if he has been eating, then looks into his eyes to see if he’s sane. He needs to trim his nose hairs, she thinks, but besides that he seems all right.
“You all right?” she says.
He blusters like a teen boy, “Oh, I’m always all right, sugar, but thanks for caring,” and for a moment Sarah Lee sees his younger self, a fresh young art-school student straight from the South, traveling the art world in the ’80s in New York, death-defying feats of drugs and art and sex, twirling around like a ballet dancer, dazzling everyone around him.
“I’ll take you at your word,” she says.
“I owe you some money,” he says. “And it’s cold! Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s cold. Let’s get you inside.”
He dashes into the backroom while she checks out his latest merchandise. She sees a new batch of screen-printed Tshirts; a new designer, she thinks, and she covets them. The design is intricate and original, no rip-off artist here, shiny silver paint shattered like a snowflake, each dot of paint like a small voice, on a sweet pink T-shirt cut and shredded and then resewn, so it hangs like gauze off the shoulders. It would look lovely on her, she thinks. She has good shoulders, the skin is soft and there are a few freckles. When she’s alone sometimes she rubs her cheek against them and wonders if everyone’s shoulders are this soft or if it is just hers. She checks the price tag—forty dollars.