The Mural

The girl on the scissor lift had been painting the wall for three days, and Jess Reinholt came out of her gallery each of those mornings with two coffees and stood on the Midtown sidewalk looking up at what had appeared overnight, because it was the best part of her day and she was not going to pretend otherwise. She was forty-six. She had opened her gallery in a downtown garage the winter she turned thirty-one, when the whole street south of the river could be had for nothing because the crash had emptied it, and she had watched it fill back up around her for a decade and a half, and she knew as well as anyone alive what this stretch of Virginia Street had been and what it had cost to become what it was now.

The wall belonged to a two-story brick building that had been, in Jess’s own memory, a used bookshop, and before that, her father had told her, a stereo store, and before that, back when the street was still the old auto strip, a garage that sold and fixed Studebakers. The bookshop had closed in the fall. The rent had gone up the way the rent went up now, all at once and past what a bookshop could ever make, and the owners had put a nice sign in the window thanking everyone for thirty years, and now the ground floor sat empty behind paper while upstairs somebody painted a mural on the flank of it that would be photographed ten thousand times. Jess had stopped being able to see one of these walls without seeing both things at once, the beauty going up and the small good thing that had gone dark underneath it, and she no longer knew how to feel about being, herself, one of the people who had made the street worth the rent that emptied it.

The girl painting was twenty-four and drove in from Sun Valley, north of Sparks, because there was nowhere she could afford to live any nearer to the wall she was painting. Jess had put her up for the commission. That was most of what Jess did now, was put the young ones up for things, write the letters, make the calls, stand between them and the people with the money, because she had somehow become, without deciding to, the person on this street who got asked, the one with the gallery that had lasted, the establishment, which was a funny word to have become when she could still remember sweeping broken glass out of a garage in a coat with no lining.

Her family had been on this street a long time. Clara Reinholt had come out from Cincinnati in nineteen twenty for a divorce and stayed to open a dress shop, a woman alone with a needle and a lease, back when Virginia Street was the whole town and the town ended a few blocks south of here in sagebrush and auto courts. Clara’s grandson Dennis, Jess’s father, had run a record store through the sixties and seventies, a block up, selling vinyl to kids who double-parked their cars in the street, and he was eighty now and still came down sometimes to sit in the gallery and tell her which building had been what. Four generations of them had made their small livings selling beautiful useless necessary things to this one street, dresses and records and now paintings, and every generation had watched the street turn into something the last one would not have recognized, and every one of them had been, Jess supposed, both the newcomer that somebody resented and the old-timer who resented the next. She was in the old-timer part of it now. That was new. She was not sure she liked how it fit.

The mural was going to be the street itself, was the thing. The girl had not been told to paint that, had chosen it, and up on the brick she was laying in a long layered thing that ran the history of the corridor across two stories, a Studebaker and a neon motel arrow and a river and a mountain and a crowd of faces that were nobody in particular and therefore everybody, and Jess, watching it come, felt the strange doubled ache of a person seeing her own life turned into a picture on a wall by someone too young to have lived any of it. The girl had gotten the motor court sign right without ever having seen one lit. She had gotten the color of the mountains at the end of the street in winter. She had put in, high up in the corner, small and exact, the arch that stood a dozen blocks north over the old downtown, its bulbs the silver and blue they had changed them to years ago, the same four words on it that had been up there in one form or another for a century, and it looked, in the painting, both like a promise and like a joke, which was about right, which was how it had always looked.

They would photograph it and put it on their phones and it would bring more people, and the people would be good for Jess and bad for the next bookshop, and there was no bottom to that, no place the street arrived at and stopped. Her whole life she had heard people say the town was finished, that it had lost whatever it used to be, the casinos or the divorces or the cheap rent or the quiet, and the town had gone on anyway, being the next thing, paving the last thing under, growing east into the desert and north into the hills and filling in every meadow her grandfather remembered as open ground. It was not finished. It was never going to be finished. That was either the tragedy of it or the whole point of it and Jess had given up deciding which.

The light was going gold down the length of Virginia Street, the way it did in the last hour, the traffic thickening for the evening, and the girl up on the lift did not stop, working fast against the dark, laying a last band of shadow under the painted mountains. Jess set the second coffee, gone cold, down on the base of the lift where the girl would find it. She should go in. She had emails, an opening to hang, a lease of her own coming up that she did not want to think about. She stood on the sidewalk a while longer instead, in the good gold light, and watched a twenty-four-year-old who could not afford to live within ten miles of this wall paint the whole story of the street onto it, faster than the dark could come down, adding one more layer to a corridor that had never once, in a hundred and fifty years, held still long enough for anyone to say what it finally was.

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