Cold Eye 2

    "Were you thinking about work?" She had just stepped out of the shower, and untwirled a towel from her hair. It fell in thick damp ropes to her shoulders. "I ran down to Battery Park today," she said. "It was freezing."
      But Hood had returned his attentions to the Times, an article about contemporary sculpture. Morris Weintraub had exploded another of his constructions, to great effect, in the middle of Columbus Circle.
    "I must be the only person in the world who gains weight with exercise."
    Hood was skimming the rest of the article to see if it mentioned anyone else he knew. He felt like indulging himself in a lazy morning - he usually took Sundays off.
    "They want me at St. Andrew's tonight."
    This time Hood looked up.
    "It's a special service. The Bishop's going to be there. It starts at seven, so I should be back at nine or nine-thirty."
     Hood looked at her reflection in the large mirror across the room. "I don't know why you keep that job."
     "We need the money!" She stopped toweling her hair and pulled at a wet strand that clung to her cheek. "It's fifty extra dollars a week - and they have a wonderful organ."
     "It's not even your instrument."
  "Playing Bach is always good practice." She began applying eyeliner—an unnecessary decoration, in Hood's opinion. He had tried many times to paint her portrait, but he could catch nothing of her character. Her huge brown eyes came off looking naïve, which she was not; the skepticism of her natural expression, and the frequent amusement, escaped his hand completely. After six years of marriage, he could not see her clearly. "Ugh," she said. "I look like a rag doll."
    She was saved from further self-criticism when the telephone rang. She answered it, then held the receiver out to Hood. "It's Leo—he want to speak to Der Meister."
    "Yes, Nicholas—this is Leo here." The German accent would have identified him a block away.
  "You're in a pay phone," Hood said. "Does that mean you're working on a Sunday?" There was no phone in their studio.   

 Cold Eye 3

    "Ja. And the work goes well for a change. Could you take my life class at four o'clock? Is it possible?"
    "Yech."
    "What does it mean, 'yech'?"
    "It means 'Only if I absolutely have to.'"
    "You get to keep the money—it goes without saying."
    "It certainly does. But if I take your class, you're not allowed to play any country and western music when I'm in the studio."
     "Ja, it's okay. I have to get back to working now."
     "See you later, then."
     "Thanks, Nicholas."
    Hood put the phone down. Susan was sitting at her harpsichord, sorting a stack of bills—which made him nervous. "Leo wants me to take his class this afternoon."
     "Great. You'll be ogling some gorgeous nymph."
    "Not me. The students. I guess I'll go into the studio too— Leo made me feel guilty."
      She held up a bill. "Sixty-five dollars for the phone? Where did you call?"
     "Sherri called me when she was over in London. I had to call her back."
      "Why didn't you call collect?"
      "I guess I didn't think of it."
      "How would you pay it, if I wasn't here?"
      "I probably wouldn't. I'd let them cut the phone off."
      "You would, too."
    Hood was irritated that she was in the right. He hadn't sold a painting for eight months; that one had gone for very little. They lived on the income from Susan's music, and she almost never complained about money.


They rode down together in the huge freight elevator—a last vestige of their building's previous incarnation as an aluminum siding warehouse. Susan pulled her woolen cap down to her eyebrows, so that her eyes looked as huge as a nocturnal animal's.
    "I'm sorry I was so bitchy," she said. "I just realized it's your birthday in about a week."  

 Cold Eye 4

    "Terrific."
    "What will you be? Thirty-two?"
   "Thirty-five." It was like her to forget his age; Hood was excessively aware of it.
    "Imagine. And we were just children in our twenties when we met."
   "Yes, it's wonderful to have achieved such success in such a short time."
    "You will," she said, as if there were not the slightest doubt.
   Outside, it was cold with the last of February, a frigid sunlight spilling down from the south. Hood liked New York's winter light; it brought out surface textures, accented architectural details. In summer, this late in the morning, the light would have been totally flat. He pulled his scarf tighter.
    They walked along Broome Street to West Broadway, famous for its prestigious galleries. The street was empty now, but later it would fill up with tourists. Hood often wished he lived in a less interesting neighborhood.
      Susan was telling him something, a concert coming up, but Hood was thinking of his painting. He could see where he had left off, down to the brushstroke. There was some question in his mind about the color of blood.
   "It'll be three hours altogether, and I should make about four hundred dollars."
      "When is this?"
   "I just told you—tomorrow might. It's a good thing I'm not sensitive."
     "Yes."
    They stopped at the corner of Sixth Avenue. Susan had to turn uptown toward St. Andrew's. She pressed the cold tip of her nose against his cheek as she kissed him. "Work well," she said, and turned away.
      Hood crossed the avenue to Watts Street, where the wind whipped up from the Hudson and chilled him to the marrow. He ran the last block to Debrosses Street and the rotting old pier building where he kept a studio with Leo Forstadt.
    The wind howled through the unoccupied ground floor, which stank of urine. A loose door flapped open and shut on rusting hinges. Hood ran up a flight of iron steps, annoyed to hear Tammy Wynette wailing from above. 

 Cold Eye 5

     When he was inside, he put a battered kettle on the hot plate and held his hands to the heat. Leo was working by the window on his side of the studio, dabbing at a painting that looked mostly brown. Fond of the earth colors, Leo. Hood made them each a cup of instant coffee, setting a mug by Leo's chair without disturbing him. His friend was working on a portrait, the head of a girl, brown hair, brown dress, the background not yet indicated.
     Hood kept his coat on, despite the space heater beside his chair. The wide windows looking over the disused docks of the Hudson cost them all their heat. Years ago, he had been thrilled to work in discomfort, but now he found nothing romantic in a falling-down warehouse, nothing inspiring in the decay. He would have given anything for a decent studio, but in Manhattan they were above the means of all but the rich and famous.
    Hood's side of the studio was cut off from Leo's by a high-tech office divider made of sound-absorbing material. It looked absurdly out of place amid the rotting wood, and it didn't protect Hood from the tears of Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline.
     He pulled the cover from his easel and looked at Friday's work. It was a monochrome reminiscent of Delvaux in shading and precision, but unlike Delvaux's dreamlike courtyards, this was a real place. He had chosen the square behind Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center—a southern view, from high up.
    Hood was pleased with the coolness of the scene, and with the accuracy of the details—the pool, the Moore, the trees and benches. But the murder wasn't quite right.
     He had set the two figures off-center, so that the viewer would not catch them immediately. The man was forcing the woman backward over the bench; her hands tore frantically at his rigid arm that pushed her back. Her face was distorted by terror and pain; she could feel her life being ripped away. Hood had already drawn the tear on her dress, the first wound. The knife in the man's upraised hand was waiting for him to add blood.
   The man's face was wrong. There was anger, fury—indeed the man's face was a vortex of rage—but it didn't look real.

 Cold Eye 6

     Hood turned from this flaw to the female victim. He wanted the viewer to cry out for this girl, this figment of his imagination, to want to reach in and save her—a feat that was entirely within his own power. But his subject was murder, and so she would die.
     Leo's chair scraped, and then he came around the partition, coffee in hand. He peered over Hood's shoulder. "Such violence in one so young and innocent."
      "I know."
    "There's a problem with the man, so." Leo pointed to the man's face.
     "It looks like something out of a comic book, doesn't it?"
      "Ja."
    The last chords of a Merle Haggard ballad faded on the cassette machine, and Hood jumped up to change the tape.
    "It's pretty good, I suppose—if you must paint a murder." Leo stroked his mustache with the point of his brush and stared down at the floor—a posture habitual with him. He looked more like a German bus conductor than an artist, and his accent was pure beer-hall, each word fully chewed.
    Hood slipped a tape of Tangerine Dream into the machine, and ignored Leo's grimace. "At least it's new," he said.
      "Ja." Leo shuffled back to his own easel. "Like all good things."
     Hood set about removing the figures from his canvas. He hated to work things over, almost never did, but at this stage the murder was largely a matter of pencil.
    "Oh! I've nearly forgotten!" The beer-hall accent came over the partition. "Valerie called me at home to say she would be late."
    "Fine. What are you talking about, Leo?"
    "Valerie Vale—she's today's model. You met her last month. I was showing her your work when you came in."
    "Oh, her!" Hood recalled a small girl with short black hair and the body of a gymnast. She had showered him with praise, which was not unpleasant, but she seemed to know nothing about art. She had raved about the 'energy' of his work, rather than its precision, which he knew to be its chief merit. He had seen her around the local bars with Sam Weigel, a drunk she had tried to reform without success.

 Cold Eye 7

     Hood and Leo worked on through the afternoon without further conversation, until Hood got up to change the cassette tape. He found a piece of paper someone had slipped under the door. An invitation. "We're invited to a party at Morris Weintraub's Tuesday night. He was in the news again today." Leo didn't hear him. Hood stuffed the invitation into his pocket, and put on a tape of Philip Glass.
      "Take it off! I can't stand this garbage!"
      "It's not garbage."
      "Repetitive nonsense. How can one work?"
      "I listened to Crystal Gayle for a bloody week!"
      "Please, Nicholas!"
     Hood didn't want to waste time arguing. He controlled his anger, and turned on the radio. They settled back to work to Pachelbel's ubiquitous Canon in D.
     Hood realigned his murder. The woman he bent back so far that her face appeared upside down. Her attacker descended like the fury of hell, the dagger had entered her once, was poised to thrust again. Should the blood be black? Or red—the one spot of color in a field of gray. Blocked by this question, Hood's mind wandered in and out of his painting. He remembered a real murder at the opera house; someone had stabbed a clarinetist on the roof. Her husband was a painter. If Susan were murdered, he would— But it was bad luck to even think of such things.
     The radio was giving a news summary. A Connecticut man who had raped and murdered several women had been granted a stay of execution. If it were ever carried out, his would be the first execution in the state in more than twenty-five years; and the first by lethal injection. An electric chair would make a more interesting painting, Hood thought.
    He attempted to clear his head by performing the simple chore of cutting canvas. He unscrewed the handle of his razor knife, took out one of the new blades, and screwed the two halves back together. When he had measured out a length of canvas, he started to cut and immediately hurled the knife against the wall. "DAMN IT!" Blood flowed into the palm of his hand, a scarlet pennant of mortality.

 Cold Eye 8

      Leo came around the partition. "What's the matter?"
      "I didn't close the knife properly."
      "Let me see."
      "It's all right. Go back to work."
     "Don't be stupid. Let me see." Leo took his hand and gazed at it, then tore off a length of paper towel. "Squeeze."
      Hood crumpled it in his fist, and Leo bent his arm up at the elbow. "Keep it raised like that."
     "Yes, Mother."
     Leo dug out a small first-aid kit, and was soon putting Hood back together with gauze and disinfectant, calm as a nurse.
     The radio had shifted its short attention span to an interview with a concert pianist, in town to play at Carnegie Hall. He was accepting the annoucer's compliments with practiced modesty.
    "Susan is just as good as those guys. Nobody ever asks her for an interview."
     Leo was winding the gauze over his cut. "Susan is maybe not so ambitious. A person doesn't play harpsichord for fame and fortune."
    "She's ambitious. She just doesn't go around telling people how wonderful she is, that's all."
    "Well, I don't know the music business." He snipped off the end of the gauze, and taped it. "All better."
     The injury had dampened Hood's spirits, and he sat on at the table in silence while Leo went back to work. He looked over at his paunchy friend who concentrated fiercely, chewing his mustache. Leo was forty-five and still lived like a student. He never had any money beyond what was in his pocket, and not a scrap of recognition. Yet he never complained. Hood was filled with fear at the prospect of hitting forty without having a great success—even if he still had six years to go.
     He got up and put the cover over his painting. His cut hand had depressed him, but at least he knew how to proceed: not red blood - he would keep things cool, paint it black.
     Out on the street, it was even colder than before. Hood was about to hail a cab when he remembered he had only seven dollars in his pocket. He had to wait a long time at the subway station, cursing his lack of money.