her arms around him. She danced him back down the stairs, hoping to coax him back to his more usual good humor, or perhaps to persuade him that the Body Artist wasn’t degenerate. As I was shutting the door behind them, I heard her say, “But, really, Uncle Sal, you can’t tell me you didn’t look at girlie magazines when you were in the Army. Why is someone nude onstage any worse?”
When I was alone, I felt hollow, restless. I didn’t want to be with Mr. Contreras and Petra and their argument, I wanted a relaxing evening with good friends. I could hear Jake across the hall playing with a group of students or colleagues, maybe girlfriends, and tried to suppress a sense of jealous exclusion. At the end of January, he was leaving for a European tour. Between rehearsals and the run-up to Christmas—the busiest season for a musician—most of his life was spent away from me these days.
I cleaned the week’s dishes out of the kitchen sink, and then, inspired by Jake’s group, did a few breathy vocal exercises. Finally, out of nervous irritability, I looked up the Body Artist’s website.
It was an odd site. She had a blog, which was mostly a series of ramblings on women in the arts, but the bulk of the site was dedicated to her body painting. You could actually buy “pieces of flesh,” as she called them—photographs of the various images we’d seen last night at Club Gouge. Each picture—priced from a hundred to a thousand dollars, depending on size, format, and content—had the number of buyers clocked under it. The most popular were the lilies growing out of her vagina and the winking blue eye.
Looking at her site added to my rumpled feelings. Who was exploiter, who was exploited? I finally went down to Mr. Contreras’s place and collected the dogs. Petra was curled up on the couch, Mitch at her side, but she was still arguing her case with my neighbor. I took the dogs and fled before the combatants could drag me back into battle.
The December night was cold but clear. We ran east, all the way to the lakefront. By the time we returned home, Petra had left. I gave the dogs back to Mr. Contreras but refused to let him reopen his grievance over the Body Artist and Club Gouge.
“Pitchers and catchers report to Mesa in two weeks,” I said. “Everything will get better after that.”
“Except Cubs fans. Don’t go trying no fake smiles on me, doll. I’m not in the mood. Spring training means lowlifes getting ready to piss on the grass.”
Mr. Contreras was a Sox fan. He’d grown up west of old Comiskey, and he hated being here in Wrigleyville during the baseball season. At least loutish Cubs fans meant a change of grievance for him, but I didn’t feel like listening to that, either.
The year was winding down, and my own workload was heavy. Hard times meant a big upswing in fraud. Even though my clients were slower in paying their bills and negotiating reduced fees for big inquiries, I still had more business than I could comfortably handle.
The only times I saw Jake were when I could make it to one of his concerts; now and then, I’d go out for a late supper with him and some of his fellow musicians. We spent Christmas Day together, and then he left to visit his mother and sister in Seattle.
Lotty and Max flew to Morocco over Christmas; Petra went skiing in Utah with her mother and sisters. Even Mr. Contreras left, although it was only to drive to Hoffman Estates, near O’Hare, where he spent a few days with his unhappy daughter and her two sons. I didn’t like the feeling of isolation, home alone in Chicago. I put the dogs in a kennel and flew down to Mexico City for a week of art, music, and warmth.
The return to Chicago the day after New Year’s felt in some ways like the descent to the Underworld. No sun, bitter cold, sick friends, and a dozen messages from unhappy clients who wanted to know if I really cared about their business or if I was just living it up on their money. Within twenty-four hours, sun and dancing seemed as remote as the end of the galaxy.
The Thursday after I came home, I left a client meeting in the Loop that had run until almost nine. I was walking east, toward the Dearborn L,