Author: George R.R. Martin
Date: 1985-11-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Short Stories; Fiction; Collections; Horror; Speculative Fiction; Anthologies
Description: The individual "Portraits of His Children" short story itself, by George R. R. Martin.

Portraits of His Children
by George R.R. Martin

ElectricStory.com, Inc.®

Portraits of His Children
by George R. R. Martin

Richard Cantling didn't regret the sacrifices he had made for his work, but he had expected his daughter to forgive and forget. When the painting arrives, it seems a gesture of reconciliation—until he's brought face to face with another of his offspring, one he never planned to meet... Winner of 1986 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

PORTRAITS OF HIS CHILDREN

Copyright © 1985 by George R. R. Martin. All rights reserved.

Original Publication: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1985

Ebook edition of “Portraits of His Children” copyright © 2005 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

ePub ISBN: 978-1-59729-071-5

Kindle ISBN: 978-1-59729-044-9

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This novella is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

Cover art by and copyright © 2005 Cory and Catska Ench.

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Portraits of His Children

By George R. R. Martin

Richard Cantling found the package leaning up against his front door, one evening in late October when he was setting out for his walk. It annoyed him. He had told his postman repeatedly to ring the bell when delivering anything too big to fit through the mail slot, yet the man persisted in abandoning the packages on the porch, where any passerby could simply walk off with them. Although, to be fair, Cantling’s house was rather isolated, sitting on the river bluffs at the end of a cul de sac, and the trees effectively screened it off from the street. Still, there was always the possibility of damage from rain or wind or snow.

Cantling’s displeasure lasted only an instant. Wrapped in heavy brown paper and carefully sealed with tape, the package had a shape that told all. Obviously a painting. And the hand that block-printed his address in heavy green marker was unmistakably Michelle’s. Another self-portrait then. She must be feeling repentant.

He was more surprised than he cared to admit, even to himself. He had always been a stubborn man. He could hold grudges for years, even decades, and he had the greatest difficulty admitting any wrong. And Michelle, being his only child, seemed to take after him in all of that. He hadn’t expected this kind of gesture from her. It was . . . well, sweet.

He set aside his walking stick to lug the package inside, where he could unwrap it out of the damp and the blustery October wind. It was about three feet tall, and unexpectedly heavy. He carried it awkwardly, shutting the door with his foot and struggling down the long foyer toward his den. The brown drapes were tightly closed; the room was dark, and heavy with the smell of dust. Cantling had to set down the package to fumble for the light.

He hadn’t used his den much since that night, two months ago, when Michelle had gone storming out. Her self-portrait was still sitting up above the wide slate mantle. Below, the fireplace badly wanted cleaning, and on the built-in bookshelves his novels, all bound in handsome dark leather, stood dusty and disarrayed. Cantling looked at the old painting and felt a brief wash of anger return to him, followed by depression. It had been such a nasty thing for her to do. The portrait had been quite good, really. Much more to his taste than the tortured abstractions that Michelle liked to paint for her own pleasure, or the trite paperback covers she did to make her living. She had done it when she was twenty, as a birthday gift for him. He’d always been fond of it. It captured her as no photograph had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash-blond hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and her smile reminded him so much of Helen, and the way she had smiled on their wedding day. He’d told Michelle more than once how much he’d like that smile.

And so, of course, it had been the smile that she’d started on. She used an antique dagger from his collection, chopped out the mouth with four jagged slashes. She’d gouged out the wide blue eyes next, as if intent on blinding the portrait, and when he came bursting in after her, she’d been slicing the canvas into ribbons with long angry crooked cuts. Cantling couldn’t forget that moment. So ugly. And to do something like that to her own work, he couldn’t imagine it. He had tried to picture himself mutilating one of his books, tried to comprehend what might drive one to such an act, and he had failed utterly. It was unthinkable, beyond even imagination.

The mutilated portrait still hung in its place. He’d been too stubborn to take it down, and yet he could not bear to look at it. So he had taken to avoiding his den. It wasn’t hard. The old house was a huge, rambling place, with more rooms than he could possibly need or want, living alone as he did. It had been built a century ago, when Perrot had been a thriving river town, and they said that a succession of steamer captains had lived there. Certainly the steamboat gothic architecture and all the gingerbread called up visions of the glory days of the river, and he had a fine view of the Mississippi from the third-story windows and the widow’s walk. After the incident, Cantling had moved his desk and his typewriter to one of the unused bedrooms and settled in there, determined to let the den remain as Michelle had left it until she came back with an apology.

He had not expected that apology quite so soon, however, nor in quite this form. A tearful phone call, yes—but not another portrait. Still, this was nicer somehow, more personal. And it was a gesture, the first step toward a reconciliation. Richard Cantling knew too well that he was incapable of taking that step himself, no matter how lonely he might become. He had left all his New York friends behind when he moved out to this Iowa river town, and had formed no local friendships to replace them. That was nothing new. He had never been an outgoing sort. He had a certain shyness that kept him apart, even from those few friends he did make. Even from his family, really. Helen had often accused him of caring more for his characters than for real people, an accusation that Michelle had picked up on by the time she was in her teens. Helen was gone too. They’d divorced ten years ago, and she’d been dead for five. Michelle, infuriating as she could be, was really all he had left. He had missed her, missed even the arguments.

He thought about Michelle as he tore open the plain brown paper. He would call her, of course. He would call her and tell her how good the new portrait was, how much he liked it. He would tell her that he’d missed her, invite her to come out for Thanksgiving. Yes, that would be the way to handle it. No mention of their argument, he didn’t want to start it all up again, and neither he nor Michelle was the kind to back down gracefully. A family trait, that stubborn willful pride, as ingrained as the high cheekbones and squarish jaw. The Cantling heritage.

It was an antique frame, he saw. Wooden, elaborately carved, very heavy, just the sort of thing he liked. It would mesh with his Victorian decor much better than the thin brass frame on the old portrait. Cantling pulled the wrapping paper away, to see what his daughter had done. She was nearly thirty now—or was she past thirty already? He never could keep track of her age, or even her birthdays. Anyway, she was a much better painter than she’d been at twenty. The new portrait ought to be striking. He ripped away the last of the wrappings and turned it around.

His first reaction was that it was a fine, fine piece of work, maybe the best thing that Michelle Cantling had ever done.

Then, belatedly, the admiration washed away, and was replaced by anger. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Michelle. Which meant it wasn’t a replacement for the portrait she had so willfully vandalized. It was . . . something else.

Someone else.

It was a face he had never before laid eyes on. But it was a face he recognized as readily as if he had looked on it a thousand times. Oh yes.

The man in the portrait was young. Twenty, maybe even younger, though his curly brown hair was already well-streaked with gray. It was unruly hair, disarrayed as if the man had just come from sleep, falling forward into his eyes. Those eyes were a bright green, lazy eyes somehow, shining with some secret amusement. He had high Cantling cheekbones, but the jawline was all wrong for a relative. Beneath a wide, flat nose, he wore a sardonic smile; his whole posture was somehow insolent. The portrait showed him dressed in faded dungarees and a raveled WMCA Good Guy sweatshirt, with a half-eaten raw onion in one hand. The background was a brick wall covered with graffiti.

Cantling created him.

Edward Donohue. Dunnahoo, that’s what they’d called him, his friends and peers. The other characters in Richard Cantling’s first novel, Hangin’ Out. Dunnahoo had been the protagonist. A wise guy, a smart mouth, too damn bright for his own good. Looking down at the portrait, Cantling felt as if he’d known him for half his life. As indeed he had, in a way. Known him and, yes, cherished him, in the peculiar way a writer can cherish one of his characters.

Michelle had captured him true. Cantling stared at the painting and it all came back to him, all the events he had bled over so long ago, all the people he had fashioned and described with such loving care. He remembered Jocko, and the Squid, and Nancy, and Ricci’s Pizzeria where so much of the book’s action had taken place (he could see it vividly in his mind’s eye), and the business with Arthur and the motorcycle, and the climactic pizza fight. And Dunnahoo. Dunnahoo especially. Smarting off, fooling around, hanging out, coming of age. “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” he said. A dozen times or so. It was the book’s closing line.

For a moment, Richard Cantling felt a vast, strange affection well up inside him, as if he had just been reunited with an old, lost friend.

And then, almost as an afterthought, he remembered all the ugly words that he and Michelle had flung at each other that night, and suddenly it made sense. Cantling’s face went hard. “Bitch,” he said aloud. He turned away in fury, helpless without a target for his anger. “Bitch,” he said again, as he slammed the door of the den behind him.

* * *

“Bitch,” he had called her.

She turned around with the knife in her hand. Her eyes were raw and red from crying. She had the smile in her hand. She balled it up and threw it at him. “Here, you bastard, you like the damned smile so much, here it is.”

It bounced off his cheek. His face was reddening. “You’re just like your mother,” he said. “She was always breaking things too.”

“You gave her good reason, didn’t you?”

Cantling ignored that. “What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish with this stupid melodramatic gesture? That’s all it is, you know. Bad melodrama. Who the hell do you think you are, some character in a Tennessee Williams play? Come off it, Michelle. If I wrote a scene like this in one of my books, they’d laugh at me.

“This isn’t one of your goddamned books!” she screamed. “This is real life. My life. I’m a real person, you son of a bitch, not a character in some damned book.” She whirled, raised the knife, slashed and slashed again.

Cantling folded his arms against his chest as he stood watching. “I hope you’re enjoying this pointless exercise.”

“I’m enjoying the hell out of it,” Michelle yelled back.

“Good. I’d hate to think it was for nothing. This is all very revealing, you know. That’s your own face you’re working on. I didn’t think you had that much self-hate in you.”

“If I do, we know who put it there, don’t we?” She was finished. She turned back to him, and threw down the knife. She had begun to cry again, and her breath was coming hard. “I’m leaving. Bastard. I hope you’re ever so fucking happy here, really I do.”

“I haven’t done anything to deserve this,” Cantling said awkwardly. It was not much of an apology, not much of a bridge back to understanding, but it was the best he could do. Apologies had never come easily to Richard Cantling.

“You deserve a thousand times worse,” Michelle had screamed back at him. She was such a pretty girl, and she looked so ugly. All that nonsense about anger making people beautiful was a dreadful clichÉ, and wrong as well; Cantling was glad he’d never used it. “You’re supposed to be my father,” Michelle said. “You’re supposed to love me. You’re supposed to be my father, and you raped me, you bastard.”

* * *

Cantling was a light sleeper. He woke in the middle of the night, and sat up in bed shivering, with the feeling that something was wrong.

The bedroom seemed dark and quiet. What was it? A noise? He was very sensitive to noise. Cantling slid out from under the covers and donned his slippers. The fire he’d enjoyed before retiring for the night had burned down to embers, and the room was chilly. He felt for his tartan robe, hanging from the foot of the big antique four-poster, slipped into it, cinched the belt, and moved quietly to the bedroom door. The door creaked a little at times, so he opened it very slowly, very cautiously. He listened.

Someone was downstairs. He could hear them moving around.

Fear coiled in the pit of his stomach. He had no gun up here, nothing like that. He didn’t believe in that. Besides, he was supposed to be safe. This wasn’t New York. He was supposed to be safe here in quaint old Perrot, Iowa. And now he had a prowler in his house, something he had never faced in all of his years in Manhattan. What the hell was he supposed to do?

The police, he thought. He’d lock the door and call the police. He moved back to the bedside, and reached for the phone.

It rang.

Richard Cantling stared at the telephone. He had two lines; a business number hooked up to his recording machine, and an unlisted personal number that he gave only to very close friends. Both lights were lit. It was his private number ringing. He hesitated, then scooped up the receiver. “Hello.”

“The man himself,” the voice said. “Don’t get weird on me, Dad. You were going to call the cops, right? Stupid. It’s only me. Come down and talk.”

Cantling’s throat felt raw and constricted. He had never heard that voice before, but he knew it, he knew it. “Who is this?” he demanded.

“Silly question,” the caller replied. “You know who it is.”

He did. But he said, “Who?”

“Not who. Dunnahoo.” Cantling had written that line.

“You’re not real.”

“There were a couple of reviewers who said that too. I seem to remember how it pissed you off, back then.”

“You’re not real,” Cantling insisted.

“I’m cut to the goddamned quick,” Dunnahoo said. “If I’m not real, it’s your fault. So quit getting on my case about it, OK? Just get your ass in gear and hustle it downstairs so we can hang out together.” He hung up.

The lights went out on the telephone. Richard Cantling sat down on the edge of his bed, stunned. What was he supposed to make of this? A dream? It was no dream. What could he do?

He went downstairs.

Dunnahoo had built a fire in the living room fireplace, and was settled into Cantling’s big leather recliner, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a bottle. He smiled lazily when Cantling appeared under the entry arch. “The man,” he said. “Well, don’t you look half-dead. Want a beer?”

“Who the hell are you?” Cantling demanded.

“Hey, we been round that block already. Don’t bore me. Grab a beer and park your ass by the fire.”

“An actor,” Cantling said. “You’re some kind of goddamned actor. Michelle put you up to this, right?”

Dunnahoo grinned. “An actor? Well, that’s fuckin’ unlikely, ain’t it? Tell me, would you stick something that weird in one of your novels? No way, joke. You’d never do it yourself and if somebody else did it, in one of them workshops or a book you were reviewing, you’d rip his fuckin’ liver out.”

Richard Cantling moved slowly into the room, staring at the young man sprawled in his recliner. It was no actor. It was Dunnahoo, the kid from his book, the face from the portrait. Cantling settled into a high, overstuffed armchair, still staring. “This makes no sense,” he said. “This is like something out of Dickens.”

Dunnahoo laughed. “This ain’t no fucking Christmas Carol, old man, and I sure ain’t no ghost of Christmas past.”

Cantling frowned; whoever he was, that line was out of character. “That’s wrong,” he snapped. “Dunnahoo didn’t read Dickens. Batman and Robin, yes, but not Dickens.”

“I saw the movie, Dad,” Dunnahoo said. He raised the beer bottle to his lips and had a swallow.

“Why do you keep calling me Dad?” Cantling said. “That’s wrong too. Anachronistic. Dunnahoo was a street kid, not a beatnik.”

“You’re telling me? Like I don’t know or something?” He laughed. “Shit man, what the hell else should I call you?” He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back out of his eyes. “After all, I am still your fuckin’ first-born.”

* * *

She wanted to name it Edward, if it turned out to be a boy. “Don’t be ridiculous, Helen,” he told her.

“I thought you liked the name Edward,” she said.

He didn’t know what she was doing in his office anyway. He was working, or trying to work. He’d told her never to come into his office when he was at the typewriter. When they were first married, Helen was very good about that, but there had been no dealing with her since she’d gotten pregnant. “I do like the name Edward,” he told her, trying hard to keep his voice calm. He hated being interrupted. “I like the name Edward a lot. I love the goddamned name Edward. That’s why I’m using it for my protagonist. Edward, that’s his name. Edward Donohue. So we can’t use it for the baby because I’ve already used it. How many times do I have to explain that?”

“But you never call him Edward in the book,” Helen protested.

Cantling frowned. “Have you been reading the book again? Damn it, Helen, I told you I don’t want you messing around with the manuscript until it’s done.”

She refused to be distracted. “You never call him Edward,” she repeated.

“No,” he said. “That’s right. I never call him Edward. I call him Dunnahoo, because he’s a street kid, and because that’s his street name, and he doesn’t like to be called Edward. Only it’s still his name, you see. Edward is his name. He doesn’t like it, but it’s his fucking name, and at the end he tells someone that his name is Edward, and that’s real damned important. So we can’t name the kid Edward, because he’s named Edward, and I’m tired of this discussion. If it’s a boy, we can name it Lawrence, after my grandfather.”

“But I don’t want to name him Lawrence,” she whined. “It’s so old-fashioned, and then people will call him Larry, and I hate the name Larry. Why can’t you call the character in your book Lawrence?”

“Because his name is Edward.”

“This is our baby I’m carrying,” she said. She put a hand on her swollen stomach, as if Cantling needed a visual reminder.

He was tired of arguing. He was tired of discussing. He was tired of being interrupted. He leaned back in his chair. “How long have you been carrying the baby?”

Helen look baffled. “You know. Seven months now. And a week.”

Cantling leaned forward and slapped the stack of manuscript pages piled up beside his typewriter. “Well, I’ve been carrying this baby for three damned years now. This is the fourth fucking draft, and the last one. He was named Edward on the first draft, and on the second draft, and on the third draft, and he’s damn well going to be named Edward when the goddamned novel comes out. He’d been named Edward for years before that night of fond memory when you decided to surprise me by throwing away your diaphragm, and thereby got yourself knocked up.

“It’s not fair,” she complained. “He’s only a character. This is our baby.

“Fair? You want fair? OK. I’ll make it fair. Our firstborn son will get named Edward. How’s that for fair?”

Helen’s face softened. She smiled shyly.

He held up a hand before she had a chance to say anything. “Of course, I figure I’m only about a month away from finishing this damn thing, if you ever stop interrupting me. You’ve got a little further to go. But that’s as fair as I can make it. You pop before I type THE END and you got the name. Otherwise, my baby here”—he slapped the manuscript again—“is first-born.”

“You can’t,” she started.

Cantling resumed his typing.

* * *

“My first-born,” Richard Cantling said.

“In the flesh,” Dunnahoo said. He raised his beer bottle in salute, and said, “To fathers and sons, hey!” He drained it with one long swallow and flipped the bottle across the room end over end. It smashed in the fireplace.

“This is a dream,” Cantling said.

Dunnahoo gave him a raspberry. “Look, old man, face it, I’m here.” He jumped to his feet. “The prodigal returns,” he said, bowing. “So where the fuck is the fatted calf and all that shit? Least you coulda done was order a pizza.”

“I’ll play the game,” Cantling said. “What do you want from me?”

Dunnahoo grinned. “Want? Who, me? Who the fuck knows? I never knew what I wanted, you know that. Nobody in the whole fucking book knew what they wanted.”

“That was the point,” Cantling said.

“Oh, I get it,” Dunnahoo said. “I’m not dumb. Old Dicky Cantling’s boy is anything but dumb, right?” He wandered off toward the kitchen. “There’s more beer in the fridge. Want one?”

“Why not?” Cantling asked. “It’s not every day my oldest son comes to visit. Dos Equis with a slice of lime, please.”

“Drinking fancy Spic beer now, huh? Shit. What ever happened to Piels? You could suck up Piels with the best of them, once upon a time.” He vanished through the kitchen door. When he returned he was carrying two bottles of Dos Equis, holding them by the necks with his fingers jammed down into the open mouths. In his other hand he had a raw onion. The bottles clanked together as he carried them. He gave one to Cantling. “Here. I’ll suck up a little culture myself.”

“You forgot the lime,” Cantling said.

“Get your own fuckin’ lime,” Dunnahoo said. “Whatcha gonna do, cut off my allowance?” He grinned, tossed the onion lightly into the air, caught it, and took a big bite. “Onions,” he said. “I owe you for that one, Dad. Bad enough I have to eat raw onions, I mean, shit, but you fixed it so I don’t even like the fucking things. You even said so in the damned book.”

“Of course,” Cantling said. “The onion had a dual function. On one level, you did it just to prove how tough you were. It was something none of the others hanging out at Ricci’s could manage. It gave you a certain status. But on a deeper level, when you bit into an onion you were making a symbolic statement about your appetite for life, your hunger for it all, the bitter and the sharp parts as well the sweet.”

Dunnahoo took another bite of onion. “Horseshit,” he said. “I ought to make you eat a fucking onion, see how you like it.”

Cantling sipped at his beer. “I was young. It was my first book. It seemed like a nice touch at the time.”

“Eat it raw,” Dunnahoo said. He finished the onion.

Richard Cantling decided this cozy domestic scene had gone on long enough. “You know, Dunnahoo or whoever you are,” he said in a conversational tone, “you’re not what I expected.”

“What did you expect, old man?”

Cantling shrugged. “I made you with my mind instead of my sperm, so you’ve got more of me in you than any child of my flesh could ever have. You’re me.”

“Hey,” said Dunnahoo, “not fucking guilty. I wouldn’t be you on a bet.”

“You have no choice. Your story was built from my own adolescence. First novels are like that. Ricci’s was really Pompeii Pizza in Newark. Your friends were my friends. And you were me.”

“That so?” Dunnahoo replied, grinning.

Richard Cantling nodded.

Dunnahoo laughed. “You should be so fuckin’ lucky, Dad.”

“What does that mean?” Cantling snapped.

“You live in a dream world, old man, you know that? Maybe you like to pretend you were like me, but there ain’t no way it’s true. I was the big man at Ricci’s. At Pompeii, you were the four-eyes hanging out back by the pinball machine. You had me balling my fuckin’ brains out at sixteen. You never even got bare tit till you were past twenty, off in that college of yours. It took you weeks to come up with the wisecracks you had me tossing off every fuckin’ time I turned around. All those wild crazy things I did in that book, some of them happened to Dutch and some of them happened to Joey and some of them never happened at all, but none of them happened to you, old man, so don’t make me laugh.”

Cantling flushed a little. “I was writing fiction. Yes, I was a bit of a misfit in my youth, but . . .”

“A nerd,” Dunnahoo said. “Don’t fancy it up.”

“I was not a nerd,” Cantling said, stung. “Hangin’ Out told the truth. It made sense to use a protagonist who was more central to the action than I’d been in real life. Art draws on life but it has to shape it, rearrange it, give it structure, it can’t simply replicate it. That’s what I did.”

“Nah. What you did was to suck off Dutch and Joey and the rest. You helped yourself to their lives, man, and took credit for it all yourself. You even got this weird fuckin’ idea that I was based on you, and you been thinking that so long you believe it. You’re a leech, Dad. You’re a goddamned thief.”

Richard Cantling was furious. “Get out of here!” he said.

Dunnahoo stood up, stretched. “I’m fuckin’ wounded. Throwing your baby boy out into the cold Ioway night, old man? What’s wrong? You liked me well enough when I was in your damn book, when you could control every thing I did and said, right? Don’t like it so well now that I’m real, though. That’s your problem. You never did like real life half as well as you liked books.”

“I like life just fine, thank you,” Cantling snapped.

Dunnahoo smiled. Standing there, he suddenly looked washed out, insubstantial. “Yeah?” he said. His voice seemed weaker than it had been.

“Yeah!” Cantling replied.

Now Dunnahoo was fading visibly. All the color had drained from his body, and he looked almost transparent. “Prove it,” he said. “Go into your kitchen, old man, and take a great big bite out of your fuckin’ raw onion of life.” He tossed back his hair, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until he was quite gone.

Richard Cantling stood staring at the place where he had been for a long time. Finally, very tired, he climbed upstairs to bed.

* * *

He made himself a big breakfast the next morning; orange juice and fresh-brewed coffee, English muffins with lots of butter and blackberry preserves, a cheese omelette, six strips of thick-sliced bacon. The cooking and the eating were supposed to distract him. It didn’t work. He thought of Dunnahoo all the while. A dream, yes, some crazy sort of dream. He had no ready explanation for the broken glass in the fireplace or the empty beer bottles in his living room, but finally he found one. He had experienced some sort of insane drunken somnambulist episode, Cantling decided. It was the stress of the on-going quarrel with Michelle, of course, triggered by the portrait she’d sent him. Perhaps he ought to see someone about it, a doctor or a psychologist or someone.

After breakfast, Cantling went straight to his den, determined to confront the problem directly and resolve it. Michelle’s mutilated portrait still hung above the fireplace. A festering wound, he thought; it had infected him, and the time had come to get rid of it. Cantling built a fire. When it was going good, he took down the ruined painting, dismantled the metal frame—he was a thrifty man, after all—and burned the torn, disfigured canvas. The oily smoke made him feel clean again.

Next there was the portrait of Dunnahoo to deal with. Cantling turned to consider it. A good piece of work, really. She had captured the character. He could burn it, but that would be playing Michelle’s own destructive game. Art should never be destroyed. He had made his mark in the world by creation, not destruction, and he was too old to change. The portrait of Dunnahoo had been intended as a cruel taunt, but Cantling decided to throw it back in his daughter’s teeth, to make a splendid celebration of it. He would hang it, and hang it prominently. He knew just the place for it.

Up at the top of the stairs was a long landing; an ornate wooden banister overlooked the first floor foyer and entry hall. The landing was fifteen feet long, and the back wall was entirely blank. It would make a splendid portrait gallery, Cantling decided. The painting would be visible to anyone entering the house, and you would pass right by it on the way to any of the second-floor rooms. He found a hammer and some nails and hung Dunnahoo in a place of honor. When Michelle came back to make peace, she would see him there, and no doubt leap to the conclusion that Cantling had totally missed the point of her gift. He’d have to remember to thank her effusively for it.

Richard Cantling was feeling much better. Last night’s conversation was receding into a bad memory. He put it firmly out of his mind and spent the rest of the day writing letters to his agent and publisher. In the late afternoon, pleasantly weary, he enjoyed a cup of coffee and some butter streusel he’d hidden away in the refrigerator. Then he went out on his daily walk, and spent a good ninety minutes hiking along the river bluffs with a fresh, cold wind in his face.

When he returned, a large square package was waiting on his porch.

* * *

He leaned it up against an armchair, and settled into his recliner to study it. It made him uneasy. It had an effect, no doubt of it. He could feel an erection stirring against his leg, pressing uncomfortably against his trousers.

The portrait was . . . well, frankly erotic.

She was in bed, a big old antique four-poster, much like his own. She was naked. She was half-turned in the painting, looking back over her right shoulder; you saw the smooth line of her backbone, the curve of her right breast. It was a large, shapely, and very pretty breast; the aureole was a pale pink and very large, and her nipple was erect. She was clutching a rumpled sheet up to her chin, but it did little to conceal her. Her hair was red gold, her eyes green, her smile playful. Her smooth young skin had a flush to it, as if she had just risen from a bout of lovemaking. She had a peace symbol tattooed high on the right cheek of her ass. She was obviously very young. Richard Cantling knew just how young: she was eighteen, a child-woman, caught in that precious time between innocence and experience when sex is just a wonderfully exciting new toy. Oh yes, he knew a lot about her. He knew her well.

Cissy.

He hung her portrait next to Dunnahoo.

* * *

Dead Flowers was Cantling’s title for the book. His editor changed it to Black Roses; more evocative, he said, more romantic, more upbeat. Cantling fought the change on artistic grounds, and lost. Afterwards, when the novel made the bestseller lists, he managed to work up the grace to admit that he’d been wrong. He sent Brian a bottle of his favorite wine.

It was his fourth novel, and his last chance. Hangin’ Out had gotten excellent reviews and had sold decently, but his next two books had been panned by the critics and ignored by the readers. He had to do something different, and he did. Black Roses turned out to be highly controversial. Some reviewers loved it, some loathed it. But it sold and sold and sold, and the paperback sale and the film option (they never made the movie) relieved him of financial worries for the first time in his life. They were finally able to afford a down payment on a house, transfer Michelle to a private school and get her those braces; the rest of the money Cantling invested as shrewdly as he was able. He was proud of Black Roses and pleased by its success. It made his reputation.

Helen hated the book with a passion.

On the day the novel finally fell off the last of the lists, she couldn’t quite conceal her satisfaction. “I knew it wouldn’t last forever,” she said.

Cantling slapped down the newspaper angrily. “It lasted long enough. What the hell’s wrong with you? You didn’t like it before, when we were barely scraping by. The kid needs braces, the kid needs a better school, the kid shouldn’t have to eat goddamn peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day. Well, that’s all behind us. And you’re more pissed off than ever. Give me a little credit. Did you like being married to a failure?”

“I don’t like being married to a pornographer,” Helen snapped at him.

“Fuck you,” Cantling said.

She gave him a nasty smile. “When? You haven’t touched me in weeks. You’d rather be fucking your Cissy.”

Cantling stared at her. “Are you crazy, or what? She’s a character in a book I wrote. That’s all.”

“Oh go to hell,” Helen said furiously. “You treat me like I’m a goddamned idiot. You think I can’t read? You think I don’t know? I read your shitty book. I’m not stupid. The wife, Marsha, dull ignorant boring Marsha, cud-chewing mousy Marsha, that cow, that nag, that royal pain-in-the-ass, that’s me. You think I can’t tell? I can tell, and so can my friends. They’re all very sorry for me. You love me as much as Richardson loved Marsha. Cissy’s just a character, right, like hell, like bloody hell.” She was crying now. “You’re in love with her, damn you. She’s your own little wetdream. If she walked in the door right now you’d dump me as fast as Richardson dumped good old Marsha. Deny it. Go on, deny it, I dare you!”

Cantling regarded his wife incredulously. “I don’t believe you. You’re jealous of a character in my book. You’re jealous of someone who doesn’t exist.”

She exists in your head, and that’s the only place that matters with you. Of course you want to fuck her. Of course your damned book was a big seller. You think it was because of your writing? It was on account of the sex, on account of her!”

“Sex is an important part of life,” Cantling said defensively. “It’s a perfectly legitimate subject for art. You want me to pull down a curtain every time my characters go to bed, is that it? Coming to terms with sexuality, that’s what Black Roses is all about. Of course it had to be written explicitly. If you weren’t such a damned prude you’d realize that.”

“I’m not a prude!” Helen screamed at him. “Don’t you dare call me one, either.” She picked up one of the breakfast plates and threw it at him. Cantling ducked; the plate shattered on the wall behind him. “Just because I don’t like your goddamned filthy book doesn’t make me a prude.”

“The novel has nothing to do with it,” Cantling said. He folded his arms against his chest but kept his voice calm. “You’re a prude because of the things you do in bed. Or should I say the things you won’t do?” He smiled.

Helen’s face was red; beet red, Cantling thought, and rejected it, too old, too trite. “Oh, yes, but she’ll do them, won’t she?” Her voice was pure acid. “Cissy, your cute little Cissy. She’ll get a sexy little tattoo on her ass if you ask her to, right? She’ll do it outdoors, she’ll do it in all kinds of strange places, with people all around. She’ll wear kinky underwear, she thinks it’s fun. She’ll let you come in her mouth whenever you like. She’s always ready and she doesn’t have any stretch marks and she has eighteen-year-old tits, and she’ll always have eighteen-year-old tits, won’t she? How the hell do I compete with that, huh? How? How? HOW?”

Richard Cantling’s own anger was a cold, controlled, sarcastic thing. He stood up in the face of her fury and smiled sweetly. “Read the book,” he said. “Take notes.”

* * *

He woke suddenly, in darkness, to the light touch of skin against his foot.

Cissy was perched on top of the footboard, a red satin sheet wrapped around her, a long slim leg exploring under his blankets. She was playing footsie with him, and smiling mischievously. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

Cantling had been afraid of this. It had been in his mind all evening. Sleep had not come easily. He pulled his foot away and struggled to a sitting position.

Cissy pouted. “Don’t you want to play?” she asked.

“I,” he said, “I don’t believe this. This can’t be real.”

“It can still be fun,” she said.

“What the hell is Michelle doing to me? How can this be happening?”

She shrugged. The sheet slipped a little; one perfect red-tipped eighteen-year-old breast peeked out.

“You still have eighteen-year-old tits,” Cantling said numbly. “You’ll always have eighteen-year-old tits.”

Cissy laughed. “Sure. You can borrow them, if you like, Daddy. I’ll bet you can think of something interesting to do with them.”

“Stop calling me Daddy,” Cantling said.

“Oh, but you are my daddy,” Cissy said in her little-girl voice.

“Stop that!” Cantling said.

“Why? You want to, Daddy, you want to play with your little girl, don’t you?” She winked. “Vice is nice but incest is best. The families that play together stay together.” She looked around. “I like four-posters. You want to tie me up, Daddy? I’d like that.”

“No,” Cantling said. He pushed back the covers, got out of bed, found his slippers and robe. His erection throbbed against his leg. He had to get away, he had to put some distance between him and Cissy; otherwise . . . he didn’t want to think about otherwise. He busied himself making a fire.

“I like that,” Cissy said when he got it going. “Fires are so romantic.”

Cantling turned around to face her again. “Why you?” he asked, trying to stay calm. “Richardson was the protagonist of Black Roses, not you. And why skip to my fourth book? Why not somebody from Family Tree or Rain?”

“Those gobblers?” Cissy said. “Nobody real there. You didn’t really want Richardson, did you? I’m a lot more fun.” She stood up and let go of the satin sheet. It puddled about her ankles, the flames reflected off its shiny folds. Her body was soft and sweet and young. She kicked free of the sheet and padded toward him.

“Cut it out, Cissy,” Cantling barked.

“I won’t bite,” Cissy said. She giggled. “Unless you want me to. Maybe I should tie you up, huh?” She put her arms around him, gave him a hug, turned up her face for a kiss.

“Let go of me,” he said, weakly. Her arms felt good. She felt good as she pressed up against him. It had been a long time since Richard Cantling had held a woman in his arms; he didn’t like to think about how long. And he had never had a woman like Cissy, never, never. But he was frightened. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

Cissy reached through the folds of his robe, shoved her hand inside his briefs, squeezed him gently. “Liar,” she said. “You want me. You’ve always wanted me. I’ll bet you used to stop and jack off when you were writing the sex scenes.”

“No,” Cantling said. “Never.”

“Never?” She pouted. Her hand moved up and down. “Well, I bet you wanted to. I bet you got hard, anyway. I bet you got hard every time you described me.”

“I,” he said. The denial would not come. “Cissy, please.”

“Please,” she murmured. Her hand was busy. “Yes, please.” She tugged at his briefs and they fluttered to the floor. “Please,” she said. She untied his robe and helped him out of it. “Please.” Her hand moved along his side, played with his nipples; she stepped closer, and her breasts pressed lightly against his chest. “Please,” she said, and she looked up at him. Her tongue moved between her lips.

Richard Cantling groaned and took her in his trembling arms.

She was like no woman he had ever had. Her touch was fire and satin, electric, and her secret places were sweet as honey.

* * *

In the morning she was gone.

Cantling woke late, too exhausted to make himself breakfast. Instead he dressed and walked into town, to a small cafe in a quaint hundred-year-old brick building at the foot of the bluffs. He tried to sort things out over coffee and blueberry pancakes.

None of it made any sense. It could not be happening, but it was; denial accomplished nothing. Cantling forked down a mouthful of homemade blueberry pancake, but the only taste in his mouth was fear. He was afraid for his sanity. He was afraid because he did not understand, did not want to understand. And there was another, deeper, more basic fear.

He was afraid of what would come next. Richard Cantling had published nine novels.

He thought of Michelle. He could phone her, beg her to call it off before he went mad. She was his daughter, his flesh and blood, surely she would listen to him. She loved him. Of course she did. And he loved her too, no matter what she might think. Cantling knew his faults. He had examined himself countless times, under various guises, in the pages of his books. He was impossibly stubborn, willful, opinionated. He could be rigid and unbending. He could be cold. Still, he thought of himself as a decent man. Michelle . . . she had inherited some of his perversity, she was furious at him, hate was so very close to love, but surely she did not mean to do him serious harm.

Yes, he could phone Michelle, ask her to stop. Would she? If he begged her forgiveness, perhaps. That day, that terrible day, she’d told him that she would never forgive him, never, but she couldn’t have meant that. She was his only child. The only child of his flesh, at any rate.

Cantling pushed away his empty plate and sat back. His mouth was set in a hard rigid line. Beg for mercy? He did not like that. What had he done, after all? Why couldn’t they understand? Helen had never understood and Michelle was as blind as her mother. A writer must live for his work. What had he done that was so terrible? What had he done that required forgiveness? Michelle ought to be the one phoning him.

The hell with it, Cantling thought. He refused to be cowed. He was right; she was wrong. Let Michelle call him if she wanted a rapprochement. She was not going to terrify him into submission. What was he so afraid of anyway? Let her send her portraits, all the portraits she wanted to paint. He’d hang them up on his walls, display the paintings proudly (they were really a homage to his work, after all), and if the damned things came alive at night and prowled through his house, so be it. He’d enjoy their visits. Cantling smiled. He’d certainly enjoyed Cissy, no doubt of that. Part of him hoped she’d come back. And even Dunnahoo, well, he was an insolent kid, but there was no real harm in him, he just liked to mouth off.

Why, now that he stopped to consider it, Cantling found that the possibilities had a certain intoxicating charm. He was uniquely privileged. Scott Fitzgerald never attended one of Gatsby’s fabulous parties, Conan Doyle could never really sit down with Holmes and Watson, Nabokov never actually tumbled Lolita. What would they have said to the idea?

The more he considered things, the more cheerful he became. Michelle was trying to rebuke him, to frighten him, but she was really giving him a delicious experience. He could play chess with Sergei Tederenko, the cynical emigre hustler from En Passant. He could argue politics with Frank Corwin, the union organizer from his Depression novel, Times Are Hard. He might flirt with beautiful Beth McKenzie, go dancing with crazy old Miss Aggie, seduce the Danzinger twins and fulfill the one sexual fantasy that Cissy had left untouched, yes, certainly, what the hell had he been afraid of? These were his own creations, his characters, his friends and family.

Of course, there was the new book to consider. Cantling frowned. That was a disturbing thought. But Michelle was his daughter, she loved him, surely she wouldn’t go that far. No, of course not. He put the idea firmly aside and picked up his check.

* * *

He expected it. He was almost looking forward to it. And when he returned from his evening constitutional, his cheeks red from the wind, his heart beating just a little faster in anticipation, it was there waiting for him, the familiar rectangle wrapped in plain brown paper. Richard Cantling carried it inside carefully. He made himself a cup of coffee before he unwrapped it, deliberately prolonging the suspense to savor the moment, delighting in the thought of how deftly he’d turned Michelle’s cruel little plan on its head.

He drank his coffee, poured a refill, drank that. The package stood a few feet away. Cantling played a little game with himself, trying to guess whose portrait might be within. Cissy had said something about none of the characters from Family Tree or Rain being real enough. Cantling mentally reviewed his life’s work, trying to decide which characters seemed most real. It was a pleasant speculation, but he could reach no firm conclusions. Finally he shoved his coffee cup aside and moved to undo the wrappings. And there it was.

Barry Leighton.

Again, the painting itself was superb. Leighton was seated in a newspaper city room, his elbow resting on the gray metal case of an old manual typewriter. He wore a rumpled brown suit and his white shirt was open at the collar and plastered to his body by perspiration. His nose had been broken more than once, and was spread all across his wide, homely, somehow comfortable face. His eyes were sleepy. Leighton was overweight and jowly and rapidly losing his hair. He’d given up smoking but not cigarettes; an unlit Camel dangled from one corner of his mouth. “As long as you don’t light the damned things, you’re safe,” he’d said more than once in Cantling’s novel Byeline.

The book hadn’t done very well. It was a depressing book, all about the last week of a grand old newspaper that had fallen on bad times. It was more than that, though. Cantling was interested in people, not newspapers; he had used the failing paper as a metaphor for failing lives. His editor had wanted to work in some kind of strong, sensational subplot, have Leighton and the others on the trail of some huge story that offered the promise of redemption, but Cantling had rejected that idea. He wanted to tell a story about small people being ground down inexorably by time and age, about the inevitability of loneliness and defeat. He produced a novel as gray and brittle as newsprint. He was very proud of it.

No one read it.

Cantling lifted the portrait and carried it upstairs, to hang beside those of Dunnahoo and Cissy. Tonight should be interesting, he thought. Barry Leighton was no kid, like the others; he was a man of Cantling’s own years. Very intelligent, mature. There was a bitterness in Leighton, Cantling knew very well, a disappointment that life had, after all, yielded so little, that all his bylines and big stories were forgotten the day after they ran. But the reporter kept his sense of humor through all of it, kept off the demons with nothing but a mordant wit and an unlit Camel. Cantling admired him, would enjoy talking to him. Tonight, he decided, he wouldn’t bother going to bed. He’d make a big pot of strong black coffee, lay in some Seagram’s 7, and wait.

* * *

It was past midnight and Cantling was rereading the leatherbound copy of Byeline when he heard ice cubes clinking together in the kitchen. “Help yourself, Barry,” he called out.

Leighton came through the swinging door, tumbler in hand. “I did,” he said. He looked at Cantling through heavily lidded eyes, and gave a little snort. “You look old enough to be my father,” he said. “I didn’t think anybody could look that old.”

Cantling closed the book and set it aside. “Sit down,” he said. “As I recall, your feet hurt.”

“My feet always hurt,” Leighton said. He settled himself into an armchair and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “Ah,” he said, “that’s better.”

Cantling tapped the novel with a fingertip. “My eighth book,” he said. “Michelle skipped right over three novels. A pity. I would have liked to meet some of those people.”

“Maybe she wants to get to the point,” Leighton suggested.

“And what is the point?”

Leighton shrugged. “Damned if I know. I’m only a newspaperman. Five Ws and an H. You’re the novelist. You tell me the point.”

“My ninth novel,” Cantling suggested. “The new one.”

“The last one?” said Leighton.

“Of course not. Only the most recent. I’m working on something new right now.”

Leighton smiled. “That’s not what my sources tell me.”

“Oh? What do your sources say?”

“That you’re an old man waiting to die,” Leighton said. “And that you’re going to die alone.”

“I’m fifty-two,” Cantling said crisply. “Hardly old.”

“When your birthday cake has got more candles than you can blow out, you’re old,” said Leighton dryly. “Helen was younger than you, and she died five years ago. It’s in the mind, Cantling. I’ve seen young octogenarians and old adolescents. And you, you had liver spots on your brain before you had hair on your balls.”

“That’s unfair,” Cantling protested.

Leighton drank his Seagram’s. “Fair?” he said. “You’re too old to believe in fair, Cantling. Young people live life. Old people sit and watch it. You were born old. You’re a watcher, not a liver.” He frowned. “Not a liver, jeez, what a figure of speech. Better a liver than a gall bladder, I guess. You were never a gall bladder either. You’ve been full of piss for years, but you don’t have any gall at all. Maybe you’re a kidney.”

“You’re reaching, Barry,” Cantling said. “I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer. That’s my life. Writers observe life, they report on life. It’s in the job description. You ought to know.”

“I do know,” Leighton said. “I’m a reporter, remember? I’ve spent a lot of long gray years writing up other people’s stories. I’ve got no story of my own. You know that, Cantling. Look what you did to me in Byeline. The Courier croaks and I decide to write my memoirs and what happens?”

Cantling remembered. “You blocked. You rewrote your old stories, twenty-year-old stories, thirty-year-old stories. You had that incredible memory. You could recall all the people you’d ever reported on, the dates, the details, the quotes. You could recite the first story you’d had bylined word for word, but you couldn’t remember the name of the first girl you’d been to bed with, couldn’t remember your ex-wife’s phone number, you couldn’t . . . you couldn’t.” His voice failed.

“I couldn’t remember my daughter’s birthday,” Leighton said. “Where do you get those crazy ideas, Cantling?”

Cantling was silent.

“From life, maybe?” Leighton said gently. “I was a good reporter. That was about all you could say about me. You, well, maybe you’re a good novelist. That’s for the critics to judge, and I’m just a sweaty newspaperman whose feet hurt. But even if you are a good novelist, even if you’re one of the great ones, you were a lousy husband, and a miserable father.”

“No,” Cantling said. It was a weak protest.

Leighton swirled his tumbler; the ice cubes clinked and clattered. “When did Helen leave you?” he asked.

“I don’t . . . ten years ago, something like that. I was in the middle of the final draft of En Passant.”

“When was the divorce final?”

“Oh, a year later. We tried reconciliation, but it didn’t take. Michelle was in school, I remember. I was writing Times Are Hard.”

“You remember her third-grade play?”

“Was that the one I missed?”

“The one you missed? You sound like Nixon saying, ‘Was that the time I lied?’ That was the one Michelle had the lead in, Cantling.”

“I couldn’t help that,” Cantling said. “I wanted to come. They were giving me an award. You don’t skip the National Literary League dinner. You can’t.”

“Of course not,” said Leighton. “When was it that Helen died?”

“I was writing Byeline,” Cantling said.

“Interesting system of dating you’ve got there. You ought to put out a calendar.” He swallowed some whiskey.

“All right,” Cantling said. “I’m not going to deny that my work is important to me. Maybe too important, I don’t know. Yes, the writing has been the biggest part of my life. But I’m a decent man, Leighton, and I’ve always done my best. It hasn’t all been like you’re implying. Helen and I had good years. We loved each other once. And Michelle . . . I loved Michelle. When she was a little girl, I used to write stories just for her. Funny animals, space pirates, silly poems. I’d write them up in my spare time and read them to her at bedtime. They were something I did just for Michelle, for love.”

“Yeah,” Leighton said cynically. “You never even thought about getting them published?”

Cantling grimaced. “That . . . you’re implying . . . that’s a distortion. Michelle loved the stories so much, I thought maybe other kids might like them too. It was just an idea. I never did anything about it.”

“Never?”

Cantling hesitated. “Look, Bert was my friend as well as my agent. He had a little girl of his own. I showed him the stories once. Once!”

“I can’t be pregnant,” Leighton said. “I only let him fuck me once. Once!”

“He didn’t even like them,” Cantling said.

“Pity,” replied Leighton.

“You’re laying this on me with a trowel, and I’m not guilty. No, I wasn’t father of the year, but I wasn’t an ogre either. I changed her diaper plenty of times. Before Black Roses, Helen had to work, and I took care of the baby every day, from nine to five.”

“You hated it when she cried and you had to leave your typewriter.”

“Yes,” Cantling said. “Yes, I hated being interrupted, I’ve always hated being interrupted, I don’t care if it was Helen or Michelle or my mother or my roommate in college, when I’m writing I don’t like to be interrupted. Is that a fucking capital crime? Does that make me inhuman? When she cried, I went to her. I didn’t like it, I hated it, I resented it, but I went to her.”

“When you heard her,” said Leighton. “When you weren’t in bed with Cissy, dancing with Miss Aggie, beating up scabs with Frank Corwin, when your head wasn’t full of their voices, yeah, sometimes you heard, and when you heard you went. Congratulations, Cantling.”

“I taught her to read,” Cantling said. I read her Treasure Island and Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit and Tom Sawyer, all kinds of things.”

“All books you wanted to reread anyway,” said Leighton. “Helen did the real teaching, with Dick and Jane.”

“I hate Dick and Jane!” Cantling shouted.

“So?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard Cantling said. “You weren’t there. Michelle was there. She loved me, she still loves me. Whenever she got hurt, scraped her knee or got her nose bloodied, whatever it was, it was me she’d run to, never Helen. She’d come crying to me and I’d hug her and dry her tears and I’d tell her . . . I used to tell her . . .” But he couldn’t go on. He was close to tears himself; he could feel them hiding in the corners of his eyes.

“I know what you used to tell her,” said Barry Leighton in a sad, gentle voice.

“She remembered it,” Cantling said. “She remembered it all those years. Helen got custody, they moved away, I didn’t see her much, but Michelle always remembered, and when she was all grown up, after Helen was gone and Michelle was on her own, there was this time she got hurt, and I . . . I . . .”

“Yes,” said Leighton. “I know.”

* * *

The police were the ones that phoned him. Detective Joyce Brennan, that was her name, he would never forget that name. “Mister Cantling?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Mister Richard Cantling?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Richard Cantling the writer?”

He had gotten strange calls before. “What can I do for you?”

She identified herself “You’ll have to come down to the hospital,” she said to him. “It’s your daughter, Mister Cantling. I’m afraid she’s been assaulted.”

He hated evasion, hated euphemism. Cantling’s characters never passed away, they died; they never broke wind, they farted. And Richard Cantling’s daughter . . . “Assaulted?” he said. “Do you mean she’s been assaulted or do you mean she’s been raped?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Raped,” she said at last. “She’s been raped, Mister Cantling.”

“I’ll be right down,” he said.

“She had in fact been raped repeatedly and brutally. Michelle had been as stubborn as Helen, as stubborn as Cantling himself. She wouldn’t take his money, wouldn’t take his advice, wouldn’t take the help he offered her through his contacts in publishing. She was going to make it on her own. She waitressed in a coffee house in the Village, and lived in a large, drafty, and rundown warehouse loft down by the docks. It was a terrible neighborhood, a dangerous neighborhood, and Cantling had told her so a hundred times, but Michelle would not listen. She would not even let him pay to install good locks and a security system. It had been very bad. The man had broken in before dawn on a Friday morning. Michelle was alone. He had ripped the phone from the wall and held her prisoner there through Monday night. Finally one of the busboys from the coffee house had gotten worried and come by, and the rapist had left by the fire escape.

When they let him see her, her face was a huge purple bruise. She had burn marks all over her, where the man had used his cigarette, and three of her ribs were broken. She was far beyond hysteria. She screamed when they tried to touch her; doctors, nurses, it didn’t matter, she screamed as soon as they got near. But she let Cantling sit on the edge of the bed, and take her in his arms, and hold her. She cried for hours, cried until there were no more tears in her. Once she called him “Daddy,” in a choked sob. It was the only word she spoke; she seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Finally they tranquilized her to get her to sleep.

Michelle was in the hospital for two weeks, in a deep state of shock. Her hysteria waned day by day, and she finally became docile, so they were able to fluff her pillows and lead her to the bathroom. But she still would not, or could not, speak. The psychologist told Cantling that she might never speak again. “I don’t accept that,” he said. He arranged Michelle’s discharge. Simultaneously he decided to get them both out of this filthy hell-hole of a city. She had always loved big old spooky houses, he remembered, and she used to love the water, the sea, the river, the lake. Cantling consulted realtors, considered a big place on the coast of Maine, and finally settled on an old steamboat gothic mansion high on the bluffs of Perrot, Iowa. He supervised every detail of the move.

Little by little, recovery began.

She was like a small child again, curious, restless, full of sudden energy. She did not talk, but she explored everything, went everywhere. In spring she spent hours up on the widow’s walk, watching the big towboats go by on the Mississippi far below. Every evening they would walk together on the bluffs; and she would hold his hand. One day she turned and kissed him suddenly, impulsively, on his cheek. “I love you, Daddy,” she said, and she ran away from him, and as Cantling watched her run, he saw a lovely, wounded woman in her mid-twenties, and saw too the gangling, coltish tomboy she had been.

The dam was broken after that day. Michelle began to talk again. Short, childlike sentences at first, full of childish fears and childish naivetÉ. But she matured rapidly, and in no time at all she was talking politics with him, talking books, talking art. They had many a fine conversation on their evening walks. She never talked about the rape, though; never once, not so much as a word.

In six months she was cooking, writing letters to friends back in New York, helping with the household chores, doing lovely things in the garden. In eight months she had started to paint again. That was very good for her; now she seemed to blossom daily, to grow more and more radiant. Richard Cantling didn’t really understand the abstractions his daughter liked to paint, he preferred representational art, and best of all he loved the self-portrait she had done for him when she was still an art major in college. But he could feel the pain in these new canvasses of hers, he could sense that she was engaged in an exorcism of sorts, trying to squeeze the pus from some wound deep inside, and he approved. His writing had been a balm for his own wounds more than once. He envied her now, in a way. Richard Cantling had not written a word for more than three years. The crashing commercial failure of Byeline, his best novel, had left him blocked and impotent. He’d thought perhaps the change of scene might restore him as well as Michelle, but that had been a vain hope. At least one of them was busy.

Finally, late one night after Cantling had gone to bed, his door opened and Michelle came quietly into his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed. She was barefoot, dressed in a flannel nightgown covered with tiny pink flowers. “Daddy,” she said, in a slurred voice.

Cantling had woken when the door opened. He sat up and smiled for her. “Hi,” he said. “You’ve been drinking.”

Michelle nodded. “I’m going back,” she said. “Needed some courage, so’s I could tell you.”

“Going back?” Cantling said. “You don’t mean to New York? You can’t be serious!”

“I got to,” she said. “Don’t be mad. I’m better now.”

“Stay here. Stay with me. New York is uninhabitable, Michelle.”

“I don’t want to go back. It scares me. But I got to. My friends are there. My work is there. My life is back there, Daddy. My friend Jimmy, you remember Jimmy, he’s art director for this little paperback house, he can get me some cover assignments, he says. He wrote. I won’t have to wait tables anymore.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Richard Cantling said. “How can you go back to that damned city after what happened to you there?”

“That s why I have to go back,” Michelle insisted. “That guy, what he did . . . what he did to me . . .” Her voice caught in her throat. She drew in her breath, got hold of herself. “If I don’t go back, it’s like he ran me out of town, took my whole life away from me, my friends, my art, everything. I can’t let him get away with that, can’t let him scare me off. I got to go back and take up what’s mine, prove that I’m not afraid.”

Richard Cantling looked at his daughter helplessly. He reached out, gently touched her long, soft hair. She had finally said something that made sense in his terms. He would do the same thing, he knew. “I understand,” he said. “It’s going to be lonely here without you, but I understand, I do.”

“I’m scared,” Michelle said. “I bought plane tickets. For tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“I want to do it quickly, before I Iose my nerve,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared. Not even . . . not even when it was happening. Funny, huh?”

“No,” said Cantling. “It makes sense.”

“Daddy, hold me,” Michelle said. She pressed herself into his arms. He hugged her and felt her body tremble.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

She wouldn’t let go of him. “You remember, when I was real little, I used to have those nightmares, and I’d come bawling into your bedroom in the middle of the night and crawl into bed between you and Mommy.”

Cantling smiled. “I remember,” he said.

“I want to stay here tonight,” Michelle said, hugging him even more tightly. “Tomorrow I’ll be back there alone. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Can I, Daddy?”

Cantling disengaged gently, looked her in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

She nodded; a tiny, quick, shy nod. A child’s nod.

He threw back the covers and she crept in next to him. “Don’t go away,” she said. “Don’t even go to the bathroom, okay? Just stay right here with me.”

“I’m here,” he said. He put his arms around her, and Michelle curled up under the covers with her head on his shoulder. They lay together that way for a long time. He could feel her heart beating inside her chest. It was a soothing sound; soon Cantling began to drift back to sleep.

“Daddy?” she whispered against his chest.

He opened his eyes. “Michelle?”

“Daddy, I have to get rid of it. It’s inside me and it’s poison. I don’t want to take it back with me. I have to get rid of it.”

Cantling stroked her hair, long slow steady motions, saying nothing.

“When I was little, you remember, whenever I fell down or got in a fight, I’d come running to you, all teary, and show you my booboo. That’s what I used to call it when I got hurt, remember, I’d say I had a booboo.”

“I remember,” Cantling said.

“And you, you’d always hug me and you’d say, ‘Show me where it hurts,’ and I would and you’d kiss it and make it better, you remember that? Show me where it hurts?”

Cantling nodded. “Yes,” he said softly.

Michelle was crying quietly He could feel the wetness soaking through the top of his pajamas. “I can’t take it back with me, Daddy. I want to show you where it hurts. Please. Please.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Go on.”

She started at the beginning, in a halting whisper.

When dawn light broke through the bedroom windows, she was still talking. They never slept. She cried a lot, screamed once or twice, shivered frequently despite the weight of the blankets; Richard Cantling never let go of her, not once, not for a single moment. She showed him where it hurt.

* * *

Barry Leighton sighed. “It was a far, far better thing you did than you had ever done,” he said. “Now if you’d only gone off to that far, far better rest right then and there, that very moment, everything would have been fine.” He shook his head. “You never did know when to write Thirty, Cantling.”

“Why?” Cantling demanded. “You’re a good man, Leighton, tell me. Why is this happening. Why?”

The reporter shrugged. He was beginning to fade now. “That was the W that always gave me the most trouble,” he said wearily. “Pick the story, and let me loose, and I could tell you the who and the what and the when and the where and even the how. But the why . . . ah, Cantling, you’re the novelist, the whys are your province, not mine. The only Y that I ever really got on speaking terms with was the one goes with MCA.”

Like the Cheshire cat, his smile lingered long after the rest of him was gone. Richard Cantling sat staring at the empty chair, at the abandoned tumbler, watching the whiskey-soaked ice cubes melt slowly.

* * *

He did not remember falling asleep. He spent the night in the chair, and woke stiff and achey and cold. His dreams had been dark and shapeless and full of fear. He had slept well into the afternoon; half the day was gone. He made himself a tasteless breakfast in a kind of fog. He seemed distant from his own body, and every motion was slow and clumsy. When the coffee was ready, he poured a cup, picked it up, dropped it. The mug broke into a dozen pieces. Cantling stared down at it stupidly, watching rivulets of hot brown liquid run between the tiles. He did not have the energy to clean it up. He got a fresh mug, poured more coffee, managed to get down a few swallows.

The bacon was too salty; the eggs were runny, disgusting. Cantling pushed the meal away half-eaten, and drank more of the black, bitter coffee. He felt hung-over, but he knew that booze was not the problem.

Today, he thought. It will end today, one way or the other. She will not go back. Byeline was his eighth novel, the next to the last. Today the final portrait would arrive. A character from his ninth novel, his last novel. And then it would be over.

Or maybe just beginning.

How much did Michelle hate him? How badly had he wronged her? Cantling’s hand shook; coffee slopped over the top of the mug, burning his fingers. He winced, cried out. Pain was so inarticulate. Burning. He thought of smouldering cigarettes, their tips like small red eyes. His stomach heaved. Cantling lurched to his feet, rushed to the bathroom. He got there just in time, gave his breakfast to the bowl. Afterwards he was too weak to move. He lay slumped against the cold white porcelain, his head swimming. He imagined somebody coming up behind him, taking him by the hair, forcing his face down into the water, flushing, flushing, laughing all the while, saying dirty, dirty, I’ll get you clean, you’re so dirty, flushing, flushing so the toilet ran and ran, holding his face down so the water and the vomit filled his mouth, his nostrils, until he could hardly breathe, until the world was almost black, until it was almost over, and then up again, laughing while he sucked in air, and then pushing him down again, flushing again, and again and again and again. But it was only his imagination. There was no one there. No one. Cantling was alone in the bathroom.

He forced himself to stand. In the mirror his face was gray and ancient, his hair filthy and unkempt. Behind him, leering over his shoulder, was another face. A man’s face, pale and drawn, with black hair parted in the middle and slicked back. Behind a pair of small round glasses were eyes the color of dirty ice, eyes that moved constantly, frenetically, wild animals caught in a trap. They would chew off their own limbs to be free, those eyes. Cantling blinked and the face was gone. He turned on the cold tap, plunged his cupped hands under the stream, splashed water on his face. He could feel the stubble of his beard. He needed to shave. But there wasn’t time, it wasn’t important, he had to . . . he had to . . .

He had to do something. Get out of there. Get away, get to someplace safe, somewhere his children couldn’t find him.

But there was nowhere safe, he knew.

He had to reach Michelle, talk to her, explain, plead. She loved him. She would forgive him, she had to. She would call it off, she would tell him what to do.

Frantic, Cantling rushed back to the living room, snatched up the phone. He couldn’t remember Michelle’s number. He searched around, found his address book, flipped through it wildly. There, there; he punched in the numbers.

The phone rang four times. Then someone picked it up.

“Michelle—” he started.

“Hi,” she said. “This is Michelle Cantling, but I’m not in right now. If you’ll leave your name and number when you hear the tone, I’ll get back to you, unless you’re selling something.”

The beep sounded. “Michelle, are you there?” Cantling said. “I know you hide behind the machine sometimes, when you don’t want to talk. It’s me. Please pick up. Please.”

Nothing.

“Call me back, then,” he said. He wanted to get it all in; his words tumbled over each other in their haste to get out. “I, you, you can’t do it, please, let me explain, I never meant, I never meant, please . . .” There was the beep again, and then a dial tone. Cantling stared at the phone, hung up slowly. She would call him back. She had to, she was his daughter, they loved each other, she had to give him the chance to explain.

Of course, he had tried to explain before.

* * *

His doorbell was the old-fashioned kind, a brass key that projected out of the door. You had to turn it by hand, and when you did it produced a loud, impatient metallic rasp. Someone was turning it furiously, turning it and turning it and turning it. Cantling rushed to the door, utterly baffled. He had never made friends easily, and it was even harder now that he had become so set in his ways. He had no real friends in Perrot, a few acquaintances perhaps, but no one who would come calling so unexpectedly, and twist the bell with such energetic determination.

He undid his chain and flung the door open, wrenching the bell key out of Michelle’s fingers.

She was dressed in a belted raincoat, a knitted ski cap, a matching scarf. The scarf and a few loose strands of hair were caught in the wind, moving restlessly. She was wearing high, fashionable boots and carrying a big leather shoulder bag. She looked good. It had been almost a year since Cantling had seen her, on his last Christmas visit to New York. It had been two years since she’d moved back east.

“Michelle,” Cantling said. “I didn’t . . . this is quite a surprise. All the way from New York and you didn’t even tell me you were coming?”

“No,” she snapped. “There was something wrong with her voice, her eyes. I didn’t want to give you any warning, you bastard. You didn’t give me any warning.”

“You’re upset,” Cantling said. “Come in, let’s talk.”

“I’ll come in all right.” She pushed past him, kicked the door shut behind her with so much force that the buzzer sounded again. Out of the wind, her face got ever harder. “You want to know why I came? I am going to tell you what I think of you. Then I’m going to turn around and leave, I’m going to walk right out of this house and out of your fucking life, just like Mom did. She was the smart one, not me. I was dumb enough to think you loved me, crazy enough to think you cared.”

“Michelle, don’t,” Cantling said. “You don’t understand. I do love you. You’re my little girl, you—”

“Don’t you dare!” she screamed at him. She reached into her shoulder bag. “You call this love, you rotten bastard!” She pulled it out and flung it at him.

Cantling was not as quick as he’d been. He tried to duck, but it caught him on the side of his neck, and it hurt. Michelle had thrown it hard, and it was a big, thick, heavy hardcover, not some flimsy paperback. The pages fluttered as it tumbled to the carpet; Cantling stared down at his own photograph on the back of the dust-wrapper. “You’re just like your mother,” he said, rubbing his neck where the book had hit. “She always threw things too. Only you aim better.” He smiled weakly.

“I’m not interested in your jokes,” Michelle said. “I’ll never forgive you. Never. Never ever. All I want to know is how you can do this to me, that’s all. You tell me. You tell me now.”

“I,” Cantling said. He held his hands out helplessly. “Look, I . . . you’re upset now, why don’t we have some coffee or something, and talk about it when you calm down a little. I don’t want a big fight.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you want!” Michelle screamed. “I want to talk about it right now!” She kicked the fallen book.

Richard Cantling felt his own anger building. It wasn’t right for her to yell at him like that, he didn’t deserve this attack, he hadn’t done anything. He tried not to say anything: for fear of saying the wrong thing and escalating the situation. He knelt and picked up his book. Without thinking, he brushed it off, turned it over almost tenderly. The title glared up at him; stark, twisted red letters against a black background, the distorted face of a pretty young woman, mouth open in a scream. Show Me Where It Hurts.

“I was afraid you’d take it the wrong way,” Cantling said.

“The wrong way!” Michelle said. A look of incredulity passed across her face. “Did you think I’d like it?”

“I, I wasn’t sure,” said Cantling. “I hoped . . . I mean, I was uncertain of your reaction, and so I thought it would be better not to mention what I was working on, until, well . . .”

“Until the fucking thing was in the bookstore windows,” Michelle finished for him.

Cantling flipped past the title page. “Look,” he said, holding it out, “I dedicated it to you.” He showed her: To Michelle, who knew the pain.

Michelle swung at it, knocked it out of Cantling’s hands. “You bastard,” she said. “You think that makes it better? You think your stinking dedication excuses what you did? Nothing excuses it. I’ll never forgive you.”

Cantling edged back a step, retreating in the face of her fury. “I didn’t do anything,” he said stubbornly. “I wrote a book. A novel. Is that a crime?”

“You’re my father,” she shrieked. “You knew . . . you knew, you bastard, you knew I couldn’t bear to talk about it, to talk about what happened. Not to my lovers or my friends or even my therapist. I can’t, I just can’t, I can’t even think about it, you knew. I told you, I told only you, because you were my daddy and I trusted you and I had to get it out, and I told you, it was private, it was just between us, you knew, but what did you do? You wrote it all up in a goddamned book and published it for millions of people to read! Damn you, damn you. Were you planning to do that all along, you sonofabitch? Were you? That night in bed, were you memorizing every word?”

“I,” said Cantling. “No, I didn’t memorize anything, I just, well, I just remembered it. You’re taking it all wrong, Michelle. The book’s not about what happened to you. Yes, it’s inspired by that, that was the starting point, but it’s fiction, I changed things, it’s just a novel.”

“Oh yeah, Daddy, you changed things all right. Instead of Michelle Cantling it’s all about Nicole Mitchell, and she’s a fashion designer instead of an artist, and she’s also kind of stupid, isn’t she? Was that a change or is that what you think, that I was stupid to live there, stupid to let him in like that? It’s all fiction, yeah. It’s just a coincidence that it’s about this girl that gets held prisoner and raped and tortured: and terrorized and raped some more, and that you’ve got a daughter who was held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, right, just a fucking coincidence!”

“You don’t understand,” Cantling said helplessly.

“No, you don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like. This is your biggest book in years, right? Number-one bestseller, you’ve never been number one before, haven’t even been on the lists since Times Are Hard, or was it Black Roses? And why not, why not number one, this isn’t no boring story about a has-been newspaper, this is rape, hey, what could be hotter? Lots of sex and violence, torture and fucking and terror, and doncha know, it really happened, yeah.” Her mouth twisted and trembled. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was all the nightmares that have ever been. I still wake up screaming sometimes, but I was getting better, it was behind me. And now it’s there in every bookstore window, and all my friends know, everybody knows, strangers come up to me at parties and tell me how sorry they are.” She choked back a sob; she was halfway between anger and tears. “And I pick up your book, your fucking no good book, and there it is again, in black and white, all written down. You’re such a fucking good writer, Daddy, you make it all so real. A book you can’t put down. Well, I put it down but it didn’t help, it’s all there, now it will always be there, won’t it? Every day somebody in the world will pick up your book and read it and I’ll get raped again. That’s what you did. You finished the job for him, Daddy. You violated me, took me without my consent, just like he did. You raped me. You’re my own father, and you raped me!”

“You’re not being fair,” Cantling said. “I never meant to hurt you. The book . . . Nicole is strong and smart. It’s the man who’s the monster. He uses all those different names because fear has a thousand names, but only one face, you see. He’s not just a man, he’s the darkness made flesh, the mindless violence that waits out there for all of us, the gods that play with us like flies, he’s a symbol of all—”

“He’s the man who raped me! He’s not a symbol!”

She screamed it so loudly that Richard Cantling had to retreat in the face of her fury. “No,” he said. “He’s just a character. He’s . . . Michelle, I know it hurts, but what you went through, it’s something people should know about, should think about, it’s a part of life. Telling about life, making sense of it, that’s the job of literature, that’s my job. Someone had to tell your story. I tried to make it true, tried to do my—”

His daughter’s face, red and wet with tears, seemed almost feral for a moment, unrecognizable, inhuman. Then a curious calm passed across her features. “You got one thing right,” she said. “Nicole didn’t have a father. When I was a little kid I’d come to you crying and my daddy would say show me where it hurts, and it was a private thing, a special thing, but in the book Nicole doesn’t have a father, he says it, you gave it to him, he says show me where it hurts, he says it all the time. You’re so ironic. You’re so clever. The way he said it, it made him so real, more real than when he was real. And when you wrote it, you were right. That’s what the monster says. ‘Show me where it hurts.’ That’s the monster’s line. Nicole doesn’t have a father, he’s dead, yes, that was right too. I don’t have a father. No I don’t.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that,” Richard Cantling said. It was terror inside him; it was shame. But it came out anger. “I won’t have that, no matter what you’ve been through. I’m your father.”

“No,” Michelle said, grinning crazy now, backing away from him. “No, I don’t have a father, and you don’t have any children, no, unless it’s in your books. Those are your children, your only children. Your books, your damned fucking books, those are your children, those are your children, those are your children.” Then she turned and ran past him, down the foyer. She stopped at the door to his den. Cantling was afraid of what she might do. He ran after her.

When he reached the den, Michelle had already found the knife and set to work.

* * *

Richard Cantling sat by his silent phone and watched his grandfather clock tick off the hours toward darkness.

He tried Michelle’s number at three o’clock, at four, at five. The machine, always the machine, speaking in a mockery of her voice. His messages grew more desperate. It was growing dim outside. His light was fading.

Cantling heard no steps on his porch, no knock on his door, no rasping summons from his old brass bell. It was an afternoon as silent as the grave. But by the time evening had fallen, he knew it was out there. A big square package, wrapped in brown paper, addressed in a hand he’d known well. Inside a portrait.

He had not understood, not really, and so she was teaching him.

The clock ticked. The darkness grew thicker. The sense of a waiting presence beyond his door seemed to fill the house. His fear had been growing for hours. He sat in the armchair, with his legs pulled up under him; his mouth hanging open, thinking, remembering. Heard cruel laughter. Saw the dim red tips of cigarettes in the shadows, moving, circling. Imagined their small hot kisses on his skin. Tasted urine, blood, tears. Knew violence, knew violation, of every sort there was. His hands, his voice, his face, his face, his face. The character with a dozen names, but fear had only a single face. The youngest of his children. His baby. His monstrous baby.

He had been blocked for so long, Cantling thought. If only he could make her understand. It was a kind of impotence, not writing. He had been a writer, but that was over. He had been a husband, but his wife was dead. He had been a father, but she got better, went back to New York. She left him alone, but that last night, wrapped in his arms, she told him the story, she showed him where it hurt, she gave him all that pain. What was he to do with it?

Afterwards he could not forget. He thought of it constantly. He began to reshape it in his head, began to grope for the words, the scenes, the symbols that would make sense of it. It was hideous, but it was life, raw strong life, the grist for Cantling’s mill, the very thing he needed. She had showed him where it hurt; he could show them all. He did resist, he did try. He began a short story, an essay, finished some reviews. But it returned. It was with him every night. It would not be denied.

He wrote it.

“Guilty,” Cantling said in the darkened room. And when he spoke the word, a kind of acceptance seemed to settle over him, banishing the terror. He was guilty. He had done it. He would accept the punishment, then. It was only right.

Richard Cantling stood and went to his door.

The package was there.

He lugged it inside, still wrapped, carried it up the stairs. He would hang him beside the others, beside Dunnahoo and Cissy and Barry Leighton, all in a row, yes. He went for his hammer, measured carefully, drove the nail. Only then did he unwrap the portrait, and look at the face within.

It captured her as no other artist had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the high angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash-blond hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and he could see the strength there, the courage, the stubbornness. But best of all he liked her smile. It was a lovely smile, a smile that illuminated her whole face. The smile seemed to remind him of someone he had known once. He couldn’t remember who.

Richard Cantling felt a strange, brief sense of relief, followed by an even greater sense of loss, a loss so terrible and final and total that he knew it was beyond the power of the words he worshipped.

Then the feeling was gone.

Cantling stepped back, folded his arms, studied the four portraits. Such excellent work; looking at the paintings, he could almost feel their presence in his house.

Dunnahoo, his first-born, the boy he wished he’d been.

Cissy, his true love.

Barry Leighton, his wise and tired alter-ego.

Nicole, the daughter he’d never had.

His people. His characters. His children.

* * *

A week later, another, much smaller, package arrived. Inside the carton were copies of four of his novels, a bill, and a polite note from the artist inquiring if there would be any more commissions.

Richard Cantling said no, and paid the bill by check.

Other Short Fiction by George R. R. Martin

“The Glass Flower”

Locus Award Nominee, Best Novelette (1987)

Asimov’s Reader Poll Nominee, Best Novelette (1987)

“In the House of the Worm”

“The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr”

“A Song for Lya”

Hugo Award, Best Novella (1975)

Other Ebooks from ElectricStory

Suzy McKee Charnas

The Vampire Tapestry

Paul Park

Soldiers of Paradise (Starbridge Chronicles 1)

Sugar Rain (Starbridge Chronicles 2)

The Cult of Loving Kindness (Starbridge Chronicles 3)

Lucius Shepard

The Jaguar Hunter

Howard Waldrop

Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

Table of Contents

Portraits of His Children

Other Short Fiction by George R. R. Martin