fit it in, what with all of the other stuff that adorned it. There seemed to be a disturbing number of men’s names – Grady counted two Franks, and wondered if they commemorated the same guy or two different ones – and when he pulled down the sheet he saw a devil’s tail tattooed across the girl’s ass, a tail whose origins were lost somewhere between her slim buttocks. Just below the nape of her neck was a wreath of green leaves with berries bright and red. Holly: that was her name. She’d even cracked a joke about the tattoo, he now recalled, something about guys remembering her name from behind.
He suddenly wanted to shower.
He rose to take a leak, hoping that when he returned the girl might have disappeared, but when he emerged from the bathroom Marielle was standing at the bedroom door while a naked, overly tattooed woman asked her for a cigarette, and then followed up by inquiring if Marielle was ‘the wife’, which suggested she had her priorities all wrong when it came to the possibility that she had just slept with a married man. It was about then that the shouting started, with the result that Grady moved out later in the morning and turned up on Teddy’s doorstep carrying his battered suitcase in one hand, his easel in the other, and his paints and brushes stored wherever he could fit them. He had no idea where Holly had disappeared to once she got dressed, but she had seemed pretty mellow about the whole business. Maybe she’d add his name to her list of conquests: possibly in her armpit, or between her toes.
Grady finished the cigarette and stubbed it out on an ashtray stolen from a bar in Bangor, back when bars still had their own ashtrays. He padded to the kitchen, found fresh bread on the table, and ham and cheese in the refrigerator. He made himself a sandwich and ate it standing up, along with a glass of milk. There was cold beer if he wanted it, but he’d fallen out of the habit of drinking beer in recent years, and the amount of it that he’d been putting through his system since he returned to Falls End was playing havoc with his digestion. He preferred wine, but Teddy only had one bottle, and that was the size of a mailbox and smelled like it had been made from a base of cheap perfume and dead flowers.
Once again Grady was feeling trapped in a way that reminded him of his youth, when all he lived for was to head south and leave his parents and his sister and every evolutionary dead-end cell of Falls End far behind. He’d wanted to go to art school in Boston or New York, but settled instead for Portland, where one of his aunts lived. She was his mother’s younger sister, regarded as dangerously bohemian by the rest of her family. She provided Grady with a room, and he got a summer job down at one of the tourist places on Commercial, serving up lobster rolls and fries, and beer in plastic glasses. He ate whatever the restaurant gave him, and apart from a few bucks a week to his aunt as a token gesture toward rent, and the occasional beer party in someone’s basement, he saved everything that he earned, and he was a good enough employee to be offered additional hours at another bar in town owned by the same guy, and so his first year at MeCA had passed comfortably.
MeCA had been the right choice for him, in the end. The college entrusted its students with a key to the premises so he could work any time that he liked, even sleeping there when he had projects due. He was marked as a student to watch right from the start, a young man with real potential. He’d even realized some of it. Perhaps he’d realized it all, and that was the problem. He was good, but he was never going to be great, and Grady Vetters had always wanted to be great, if only to prove to his family and the doubters up in Falls End how wrong they’d been about him. But the disparity between his desire and his ability, between his reach and his grasp, had quickly become apparent to him when he left the comforting embrace of MeCA and tried to make his way in the big, bad art world. That was