Forgetfulness by Ward Just

only a pure brushstroke.
    The Spaniard laughed in high good humor.

    Thomas turned his back to the mountain, noticing that the moonlight had vanished, clouds gathering to the south. Bad light tomorrow for painting but he had no good ideas anyhow. When you were drained of emotion, you were drained of ideas also. Your memories were less vivid because your imagination had gone AWOL. You lived in the half-light of dusk or the crack of dawn when it seemed time could go either way. On the easel was the half-finished portrait of the
patron
of the café, old Bardèche's heavy arms resting on the zinc bar, an expression of—he supposed the expression was one of suspicion. Thomas had made the sketches one afternoon in September, sitting at his usual table near the pinball machine. He was waiting for Florette and making sketches while he watched the bar action. The
patron
moved with circumspection, as if he had all the time in the world and his customers had all the time in the world also. His hands were so big the glasses seemed to disappear into them and when he placed them on the bar the effect was of a rabbit pulled from a hat. Old Bardèche habitually wore a years-old white cardigan sweater with leather patches at the elbows, a Florette. His café reminded Thomas of the Spanish communist's utopian state. However disagreeable or uncooperative his customers became, the café
itself was sublime, an oasis of conformity and democratic socialism; things never got too unruly because there were laws strictly enforced. With old Bardèche behind the bar and his hatchet-faced wife, Agnès, supervising the caisse, a superior authoritarian order prevailed. In fact, the café did not serve the customers. The customers served the café. That was what made the behavior of the American tourists so shocking, the blind man seeming to instigate a counterrevolution. The Americans came from a world far distant from the café, an aggressive democratic world where rights had pride of place, including the right to spit in anyone's eye. Thomas thought often of the Americans when he worked on old Bardèche's portrait. He was certain the
patron
would be pleased with it and ecstatic when he presented it to him as a gift. He might even stand Thomas a lager on the house. Two, if he was feeling generous.
    Fat snowflakes began to fall, tumbling in slow motion. The patterns of the snow in the air suggested faces and Thomas was convinced he was looking at the men who had harmed Florette; and then the apparitions vanished as the wind disturbed the snowfall. What was owed the dead? And when he discharged his debt, what was his reward? Thomas was unable to think it through, his spirit so crowded with the events of the week and his own fathomless distress. One day bled into another and here he was, alone at last on a Sunday evening discovering faces in the snow. Thomas could not see his way forward because he was empty of feeling and that was why his life would become difficult. Always in the past he had managed to submerge himself in work, slip comfortably between the paint and the canvas; that was how he got on, one day to the next. Certainly he could gain time by returning to old Bardèche's portrait, a neutral subject, and then he recalled that he had given the old man Florette's eyes, their slant and glitter and the wrinkles at the corners, a suggestion of mischief. Wasn't there every possibility that her eyes would draw him into some kind of reconciliation, meaning a way of finding his new place in the world? Thomas did not know what was required of him and if Bernhard's monstrous suggestion turned out to be true, what then? Bernhard in his zeal to find coherence where there was no coherence made life intolerable; that, and his insistence on worst-case wagers. Thomas knew in his heart that Florette had met with misfortune, a misadventure, some combination of the two, wrong time, wrong place.
    He had always thought of his odd jobs as a