1 Portrait of a Gossip

Juliet Henry thought it good that she hadn’t killed herself
the night before since the day had turned out so lovely. Not that there had
been anything deliberate about her near demise, but she shouldn’t have been out
driving in that beastly storm when flash floods were a possibility. Now she
would have to have someone clean the mud out of her car before she could use it
again. Her neighbors had had better sense than to try to get down to White Oaks
for the opening of the new gallery, and that included the featured artist, Raphael
James, whose paintings were in the finest galleries in San Francisco and New
York. He didn’t need to display at the White Oaks Emporium. This was just
noblesse oblige
, throwing the local dog
a bone.
A very nice bone that Juliet had wanted to see.

On the upside, the storm had scoured the sky blue. There
wasn’t a cloud anywhere and the limitless light was as clear on earth as it was
in heaven, or so she believed. Only the hawks would know for certain and they
weren’t talking. If she decided to paint it she would have to break out the
ultramarine blue she usually reserved for lupines.

Harvey Allen’s alleged feline, Marley, had fallen asleep on
the stack-stone wall about six feet from her easel in a patch of early sun. Possibly
he was gathering strength for his second effort to lure her into feeding him. He
was covered in soft white petals fallen from the aging apple tree, the last
holdouts that had resisted the storm but were ready to give themselves up to
the sun and intermittent, gasping breeze of morning as it climbed up the draw.
Only a few tufts of orange fur sticking out of the white fluff suggested that
the largish lump was in fact a cat and not another rock.

Come to think of it, Marley’s presence so early in the
morning was a little odd. Neither Harvey nor Marley were early risers, though
at least Marley never presented himself in public with bloodshot eyes and
breath
smelling of whisky when he deigned to join the other
residents.

The relationship between the man and the cat was not an
expected one, and Juliet had decided that Harvey fed the cat so that he could
be seen to have some redeeming feature, and of course Marley was in it for the
food. But is seemed obvious to her that the relationship lacked emotional
conviction on both sides and Marley would move house if he got a better offer.

She had thought of making that offer though she had never
owned a cat. Marley was fond enough of Juliet, or at least her tuna fish
sandwiches which she packed on days when she was painting, to not be put off by
the smell of turpentine or her favorite Siena red paint. Though Juliet was
likewise warmhearted toward Marley and enjoyed his company when she worked, she
had no fondness for his human landlord and therefore withheld offers of
adoption which would cause rancor and perhaps retaliatory snooping.

Her low opinions of Harvey Allen’s morals and personality were
not unique, though he had not aroused her to speechless fury as he had so many
of her neighbors.
Perhaps because she hadn’t been there long
enough for him to discover anything about her.

There were things to discover though, and she knew that he
might manage the feat someday no matter how discreet she was. Harvey was a
professional gossip.

Normally he would not have been allowed inside their little
artists’ colony, but Harvey Allen had decided to write a book. No one was sure
what it was about; a collection of his Elvis sightings or alien abduction
stories from the rags he wrote for was one guess. It didn’t much matter what he
was writing about. By becoming a book author, Harvey had the right to rent one
of the small studios and move into the artists’ compound known as Bartholomew’s
Wood.

He was a fly in the otherwise perfectly smooth ointment of
her new life. And, in spite of his presence, Juliet remained steadfast in her
conviction that this was the right place for her to be. It was a marriage of
old-fashioned values and basic modern comforts.

Juliet shook her head, uncapped her paint, and began mixing
colors. The tricky part was not accurately mixing the red earth tones all
around her. It was doing it in a way that wasn’t flat and cliché. She liked
representational art, but had her desire simply been to document what was
there, she would have used a camera.
Which she still had.
Several of them, most small and undetectable to the average
eye.
They were a souvenir from her days at the very private, very secret
think tank of the NSA and a boss who gave her “toys” for her birthday instead
of flowers.

There had been both relief and frustration when she took
early retirement. Juliet was good at solving puzzles, and her boss knew it, but
many of her coworkers were uncomfortable around the woman who could “see over
horizons.”

Juliet preferred to think of her gift as having moments of
forensic intuition. There was much less melodrama that way. But however you
described it, she had had a talent for seeing what was below the surface
situation, noticing patterns, seeing the anomalies.
The lies.
Most people don’t want to be around someone who could look through their lies,
especially the ones they told themselves in moments of rationalization.

Of course, there are others for whom lying is a coping
mechanism, a gospel even.
Lying on admission forms, lying on
résumés, lying to the IRS.
Hell, lying on their online dating profiles while
lying to their spouses about being busy working overtime. And almost nobody—except
the wronged spouse—was shocked when it happened. The consensus these days was
that everyone
lied—
large companies, large churches,
small countries, politicians of every stripe. Lying wasn’t a big deal anymore,
not a deadly sin.

And these minor lies had to be sorted through to find the
really important lies—the ones masking persons whose hidden plots were of
political or religious violence. And it wasn’t easy to disprove the work of a
master deceiver once it was accepted as established truth. Big lies had to be
found, traced, and discredited in one news cycle.

There had been unrelenting pressure. Every day was like
spinning plates. Even if you were good, eventually something would crash and
then there was a terrible mess and pointing fingers, because in her division
there was no acknowledgment of the reality that sometimes shit just happened.

A squirrel dashed by, leaping from the apple tree to one of
the white oaks a good eight feet away. He looked like a little old man in a
tatty fur coat running after a bus. Clearly he was bent on death but managed to
make the leap anyway. More blossoms fell as he scrambled away down a laden
branch. The petal mound shifted and Marley lifted his head to look at the
squirrel’s fleeing tail. It was an exceptionally broad head, almost bulldog-like,
and his eyes might have been called malevolent. They might equally have been
called gold by someone less imaginative.

“Good morning again,” Juliet said. “You are up and about at
an early hour.”

The cat said nothing, just closed his eyes and rested his
heavy head back on the wall.

“
Reeow
.”

“What were you doing last night—haunting some speakeasy?
Carousing with lady cats of low morals?” Juliet asked.

It was not surprising that speakeasies should come to mind. Yesterday
was everywhere around her. No new buildings had gone in since the 1930s and
some were older than that. The wiring had been replaced a few years ago along
with the weather stripping at the insistence of the fire marshal because while
everyone liked the authentic 1930s architecture, no one liked seventy-year-old
wiring. Juliet had also installed a water softener. The well water used by the
compound was very hard and left lime deposits in the toilet and also in one’s
hair and laundry, which was unacceptable. If she wished to bathe with pumice
she would purchase some.

The bungalows were of a strange design, built with small
living spaces so that there was room for a large studio where the artists might
work. Few windows were installed in the bedrooms and kitchen. The glass was all
reserved for the working spaces. They were staggered so the view was obstructed
and each house was built so that the roof of the lower one came no higher than
the floor of the home above it. From the parking lot at the base of the colony,
the Wood was just a huddle of shake roofs, poking out of the trees and
boulders. From above, it looked like a ski slope that some intrepid snowboarder
could negotiate with ease.

The compound had also been fenced in the 60s to keep out the
deer, and the mountain lions that followed them. Or so the official story went.
Juliet suspected it had really been fenced to keep out people who weren’t
artists, i.e. the rest of the world, which had discovered the nearby town of
White Oaks and were using it to tune in and turn on. There had also been an
accident up on the promontory when a turned on person fell into the river.

Established in the early 20s, the compound was built on the
side of a mountain in one of the geologic folds that was usually clear of fog,
but which was unfit for logging or agriculture and therefore could be had
cheaply back in the day. Later the locals fought plans for development in the
courts and legislature and had won most of their battles. They liked trees in
their forests and fish in their streams and air that didn’t smell like anything
manmade. White Oaks and environs would not be getting any high-rise urban
developments. Consequently, what homes there were had become quite valuable and
Juliet was fortunate to be accepted into the art colony where bungalows were
rented at rates that starving artists could afford.

The mountain village was terraced and stitched together by a
switchback trail where clumps of lupines grew, bursting blue for a few weeks
and then fading to a tawny mountain lion color. That was what Juliet was
painting that morning, the flowers almost unbearably showy and yet lovely for
being completely accidental in their placement.

A man stepped out of his cottage and admired the day, doing
a modified sun salutation while holding a cane. Seeing Juliet on the terrace
above him he raised a hand in greeting.

“Good morning, Mickey,” she called to the graying scarecrow
whose height made him easily identifiable even at distances.

The first terrace of bungalows was reserved—in theory—for
the elderly, or tenants with physical infirmities. One of the current residents
was Mickey Shaw, a potter who used a cane but was otherwise quite stable and
hearty and always affable.

“Good morning, Juliet.
Capturing God’s
splendor?”
Mickey was also religious, or at least spiritual. Juliet did
not mistake painting for High Mass, but knew that it brought her closer to the
Divine than anything else did and didn’t begrudge him his higher feelings or
occasional joint of marijuana.

“It would be a shame to waste such a day,” she agreed
politely, without discussing whether it was God’s or Nature’s splendor she was
attempting to paint.

“Greeting
cards,
or t-shirts?”
Mickey asked, knowing that she supported herself with a couple small commercial
endeavors. Unlike some, he did not sneer at work that put food on the table. He
had minimal ego. Like Juliet, he took his work as an artist seriously, but
never himself.

“Both.”
If she was lucky.
The local
souvenir shops would probably take both once she transferred the design onto
her computer and then onto greeting cards and wearable textiles, like
sweatshirts, t-shirts, and aprons.

“Carry on then,” he said and raised his hand again. “I need
to get some coffee in me. These days I’m no good without it.”

It did not surprise Juliet when Raphael James emerged soon
after. He was using his lightweight, manual wheelchair that morning, meaning
that he had no intention of leaving the colony. Raphael painted mainly watercolors
which he sold for ridiculous amounts of money in galleries all over the west
coast, but he also did religious paintings in the style of his namesake. While
other artists might lust after Fulbright or Guggenheim grants, Raphael James
did not. He did not have Blue Periods, or Red Periods, and he did not show
scorn for lesser artists. He did not use gimmicks to gain attention, fostered
no cults of personality. Great artists could make their way in the world
without them. The idea that he would need any help to achieve his goals was met
with silent disdain. Juliet wondered if he had been that way before the
wheelchair. She suspected that he had, and any pity she might have felt for his
limited mobility was blasted away like dry leaves before a storm wind the first
time she met him. There was something a little frightening about true
greatness.