“There’s one missing,” said Borogove, checking off her list as the workmen unloaded the last of my paintings from the rented panel truck and carried them in the front door of the gallery. Other workmen were taking Bucky’s giant tits and asses out the back door.
“This is all of it,” I said. “Everything I’ve ever painted. I even borrowed back two paintings that I had traded for rent.”
Borogove consulted her list. “According to the two guys from the future, three of your early paintings are in the Museo de Arte Inmortal del Mundo in 2255: ‘Tres Dolores,’ ‘De Mon Mouse,’ and ‘La Rosa del Futuro.’ Those are the three they want.”
“Let me see that list,” I said.
“It’s just the titles. They have a catalogue with pictures of what they want, but they wouldn’t show it to me. Too much danger of Timesplits.”
“Slips,” I said. We looked through the stacked canvases again. I am partial to portraits. “De Mon Mouse” was an oil painting of the super in my building, a rasta who always wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts. He had a collection of two.
“Tres Dolores” was a mother, daughter, and grandmother I had known on Avenue B; it was a pose faked up from photographs—a sort of tampering with time in itself, now that I thought of it.
But “La Rosa del Futuro”?
“Never heard of it,” I said.
Borogove waved the list. “It’s on here. Which means it’s in their catalogue.”
“Which means it survives the holocaust,” I said.
“Which means they pick it up at midnight, after the opening Wednesday night,” she said.
“Which means I must paint it between now and then.”
“Which means you’ve got four days.”
“This is crazy, Borogove.”
“Call me Mimsy,” she said. “And don’t worry about it. Just get to work.”
“There’s pickled herring in the
“I thought you were Puerto Rican,” said Shorty.
“I am, but my ex-boyfriend was Jewish, and that stuff keeps forever.”
“I thought there were no single men in New York.”
“Exactly the problem,” I said. “His wife was Jewish too.”
“You’re sure I’m not keeping you from your work?” said Shorty.
“What work?” I said forlornly. I had been staring at a blank canvas since ten P.M. “I still have one painting to finish for the show, and I haven’t even started it.”
“Which one?”
“La Rosa del Futuro,” I said. I had the title pinned to the top corner of the frame. Maybe that was what was blocking me. I wadded it up and threw it at the wall. It only went halfway across the room.
“I think that’s the most famous one,” he said. “So you know it gets done. Is there a blossom—”
“A Bud,” I said. “In the door of the fridge.”
“Maybe what you need,” he said, with that shy, sly futuristic smile I was growing to like, “is a little rest.”
After our little rest, which wasn’t so little, and wasn’t exactly a rest, I asked him, “Do you do this often?”
“This?”
“Go to bed with girls from the past. What if I’m your great-great-grandmother or something?”
“I had it checked out,” he said. “She’s living in the Bronx.”
“So you do! You bastard! You do this all the time.”
“Teresa!
“Those little what?”
He blushed. “Those little hands and feet. I fell in love.”
It was my turn to blush. He had won my heart, a guy from the future, forever.
“So if you love me so much, why don’t you take me back to the future with you?” I asked, after another little rest.
“Then who would paint all the paintings you are supposed to paint over the next thirty years? Teresa, you don’t understand how famous you are going to be. Even I have heard of Picasso, Michelangelo, and the great Algarin—and art is not my thing. If something happened to you, the Timeslip would throw off the whole history of art.”
“Oh. How about that.” I couldn’t seem to stop smiling. “So why don’t you stay here with me.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “But if I stayed here, I wouldn’t be around to come back here and meet you in the first place. And if I had stayed here, we would know about it anyway, since there would be some evidence of it. See how complicated Time is? I’m just a delivery guy and it gives me a headache. I need another leaf.”
“Bud,” I said. “You know where they are.” He went into the kitchen for a
“Die? Holocaust?”
“The one you’re not allowed to tell me about. The nuclear war.”
“Oh, that. Stretch is just trying to alarm you. It’s not a war. It’s a warehouse fire.”
“All this
“It’s cheaper to go back and get the stuff than to avoid the fire,” he said. “It all has to do with Timeslip insurance or something.”
The phone rang. “How’s it going?”
“It’s two in the morning, Borogove!” I said, in
“Please, Teresa, call me Mimsy. Is it finished?”
“I’m working on it,” I lied. “Go to sleep.”
“Who was that?” Shorty asked, in Spanish. “
